CALIBAN 



THE MISSING LINK 






CALIBAN: 



THE MISSING LINK 



- - DANIEL WILSON, LL.D. 

II 

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND ENGLISH LITERATURE, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, 
TORONTO. 




MACMILLAN AND CO. 

1873 
[ All rights reserved.'] 






OXFORD: 

Ey T. Combe, M.A., E. B. Gardner, E, Pickard Hall, and J. H. Stacy, 

PRINTERS TO THE UNIVERSITY. 



/ 



/ 



3D I a n c §L g t c I, 



MY SHAKESPEARE SCHOLAR, 



THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED 



VERY LOVINGLY 



BY HEE FATHER. 



CONTENTS 



PREFACE 

CHAP. I. IN THE BEGINNING 

II. THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION 

in. Caliban's island 

IV. THE TEMPEST 

V. THE MONSTER CALIBAN 

VI. CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN 

VII. CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN . 

VIII. THE SUPERNATURAL 

IX. GHOSTS AND WITCHES 

X. FAIRY FOLK-LORE 

XL THE COMMENTATORS . 

XII. THE FOLIOS 

XIII. NOTES ON 'THE TEMPEST ' . 

XIV. A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM 



PAGE 

vii 
i 

13 

39 

55 

67 

92 
114 
140 

155 
166 

194 
21 1 
222 
239 



PREFACE. 



'I'll believe as soon 
This whole earth may be bored, and that the moon 
Ma)' through the centre creep, and so displace 
Her brother's noontide with the Antipodes. 
It cannot be.' — A Midsummer Night's Dream. 

THE Antipodes, in Shakespeare's day, were beings 
for whom the world, and all which pertains to it, were 
turned upside down. The ideas entertained of them 
were of the very vaguest kind ; the capacity of belief 
in regard to them was restrained by no ordinary limits 
of experience or analogy. The most that could be af- 
firmed with any confidence in regard to them, seemed 
to be that they must exist under conditions in all re- 
spects the reverse of our own ; and with their heads, if 
not absolutely where their heels should be, yet some- 
where else than on their shoulders. The sun was below, 
and the earth above them. They were manifestly beings 
with which fancy had free scope to sport at will. 

' The cannibals that each other eat,' concerning whom 
Othello discoursed to his admiring auditors, are now 
very familiar to us. Of that other class of 'anthropo- 
phagi, whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders,' 
ocular testimony seems more remote than ever. ' When 



PREFACE. 



we were boys,' says Gonzalo, in 'The Tempest,' 'who 
would believe there were such men whose heads stood in 
their breasts ; ' of which, nevertheless, now every New 
World adventurer ' will bring us good warrant' Later 
explorations, either in the regions of actual travel, or in 
those of scientific research, have failed to confirm such 
warranty. But somewhere outside the old world of 
authenticated fact, Shakespeare found, or fashioned for 
us, a being which has come, in our own day, to possess 
an interest, undreamt of either by the men of the poet's 
age, or by that profane generation for which Dryden 
and D'Avenant revived ' The Tempest,' with changes 
adapted to the prurient court of the later Stuarts. 

It will need no apology to the appreciative student 
of Shakespeare that ' the missing link ' in the evolution 
of man should be sought for in the pages of him ' whose 
aim was to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature ;' nor, 
if it is to be recovered anywhere, will he wonder at its 
discovery there. Ben Jonson said truly 

' He was not of an age, but for all time.' 

Much that he wrote was imperfectly appreciated even by 
the men of his own day. It was too refined, too noble, 
too lofty in its marvellous range of thought and feeling, 
for later generations of the Restoration and Revolution 
eras. It will ever fail of adequate comprehension by a 
frivolous or a faithless age. Shakespeare is indeed ca- 
pable of proving the source, not merely of pastime, but 
of supreme delight to the mere pleasure seeker. But 



PREFACE. 



there are not only passages, but whole characters in his 
dramas, the force of which is wholly lost on him who 
turns to them in no more serious mood than to an or- 
dinary tale or novel. When such a mere dallier, as the 
youthful reader is apt to be, has become a loving stu- 
dent, and learned to enter into true sympathy with the 
poet, he discovers a depth of meaning undreamt of 
before, and catches at length the just significance of 
his first admiring editors' advice ' to the great variety 
of readers' : — ' Read him, therefore, and again and again ; 
and if then you do not like him, surely you are in some 
manifest danger not to understand him.' 

The dramas of Shakespeare have been studied by 
the present writer under very diverse circumstances. 
He became possessor of the old 1632 folio in youthful 
days, when it could be bought on an Edinburgh book- 
stall for a few shillings. He was already accustomed 
to resort to Shakespeare's pages as a source of rare 
enjoyment ; and in this and other editions the great 
dramatist was read, in the only way in which the spirit 
of his writings is to be caught by a venerating, loving 
student. In more recent years, it has been his pleasant 
duty to read some of the great master's choicest works 
with Canadian undergraduates, as part of the Honour 
Work of the University of Toronto ; and thus — in what 
was, in days greatly more recent than those of Shake- 
speare, an unexplored wild of the New World, — to fulfil 
the behest of his first editors : who, having commended 
the reading and re-reading of the great dramatist as 



PREFACE. 



indispensable for the true understanding of him, thus 
conclude — 'And so we leave you to other of his friends, 
who, if you need, can be your guides. If you need 
them not, you can lead yourselves and others ; and such 
readers we wish him.' 

In such a study of Shakespeare, his many-sidedness, 
his universality, his ever-renewing modernness, startle 
the reader afresh, when he has vainly fancied that he 
already appreciates him at his highest worth. The 
sympathies of the man seem all-embracing. He com- 
prehends every phase of human character, every im- 
pulse and passion of the human soul, every conceivable 
stage of development of the human mind. 

In this age, which, not altogether without justifica- 
tion, claims for itself a more adequate appreciation of 
England's greatest poet than he has before received, 
there are engrossing themes, alike in the departments 
of faith and science, undreamt of in Shakespeare's day; 
and, above all, there is that one in which science and 
faith alike claim a share, which professes to furnish 
entirely novel revelations of the origin of man and the 
evolution of mind. By Shakespeare, I imagine, the old 
narrative of what was done 'in the beginning,' was re- 
ceived undoubtingly as true. As to Sir Thomas Browne, 
who is accepted in the following pages as, in some 
respects, the representative of a later and very different 
age, his mode of affirming his faith in the primitive 
story is in this quaintly characteristic fashion : ' Whether 
Eve was framed out of the left side of Adam, I dispute 



PRE FA CE. 



not ; because I stand not yet assured which is the right 
side of a man, or whether there be any such dis- 
tinction in nature. That she was edified out of the rib 
of Adam I believe, yet raise no question who shall 
arise with that rib at the resurrection.' 

Of such a theory or system of human descent as now 
challenges universal acceptance, Shakespeare entertained 
as little thought as Bacon did. The elements of its con- 
ception lay remote from every theme with which his 
mind delighted to dally ; and far apart from all those 
deeper thoughts on which he mused and pondered, till 
they assumed immortal embodiment in his own Hamlet. 
And yet he had thought out, and there sets forth with 
profoundest significance, the essential distinctions and 
attributes of humanity :— 

' What is a man, 
If his chief good and market of his time 
Be but to sleep and feed ? a beast, no more. 
Sure he that made us with such large discourse f 
Looking before and after, gave us not 
That capability and god-like reason 
To fust in us unused.' 

He had not only sounded all the depths of the human 
soul, but he had realised for himself the wholly diverse 
motives and cravings of the mere animal mind. The 
leading purpose of the following pages is, accordingly, 
to shew that his genius had already created for us the 
ideal of that imaginary intermediate being, between the 
true brute and man, which, if the new theory of descent 
from crudest animal organisms be true, was our prede- 



PRE FA CE. 



cessor and precursor in the inheritance of this world of 
humanity. We have in ' The Tempest ' a being which is 
' a beast, no more,' and yet is endowed with speech and 
reason up to the highest ideal of the capacity of its lower 
nature. A comparison between this Caliban of Shake- 
speare's creation, and the so-called 'brute-progenitor of 
man ' of our latest school of science, has proved replete 
with interest and instruction to the writer's own mind ; 
and the results are embodied in the following pages, for 
such readers as may care to follow out the same study 
for themselves. 

The main theme is accompanied with a commentary 
on two plays of Shakespeare, ' The Tempest,' and 'A 
Midsummer Night's Dream,' chiefly appealed to in the 
course of the preceding argument. Some of the conjec- 
tural readings and other subjects touched on in this 
supplement may be of interest to Shakespeare students. 
Corrupt as the text of Shakespeare's plays undoubtedly 
is, the author is far indeed from thinking that they stand 
in need of any great amount of note or comment. The 
loving student of his dramas, even with the most im- 
perfect text, learns to enter so thoroughly into their 
spirit and the personality of their characters, that he is 
scarcely conscious of obscurity. He catches, as it were, 
the sense of the whole ; and in many a controverted 
passage, has never thought of obscurity, or felt any 
difficulty in enjoying it, till he has turned to the com- 
mentators, and learns how sorely they have been per- 
plexing themselves over its riddles. 



PREFACE. 



Yet commentators have done good service in this, if 
in no other respect. They have led to the diligent study 
of Shakespeare, even if it were at times only ' of envy 
and strife.' But for the well-timed, though indiscri- 
minate censures of Jeremy Collier, in his famous ' Short 
View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English 
Stage,' published in 1698, and the controversies which 
they provoked, the study of Shakespeare, on which his 
true appreciation depended, might have been long de- 
layed. The Rev. Joseph Hunter, in his 'Disquisition on 
Shakespeare's Tempest,' wonders ' that so much respect 
has not been paid to Dryden as to find a place in the 
prolegomena of this play for the portion of the prologue 
to his own and D'Avenant's transversion of it, in which 
he pays so fine a compliment to Shakespeare.' But no 
one who has any regard for the fair fame of Dryden will 
seek to recall, in association with the name of Shake- 
speare, the authorship of a 'transversion' which is with- 
out exception the most contemptible evidence of the 
utter incapacity of the Restoration era to comprehend 
Shakespeare. It is not as a dramatist that Dryden takes 
rank among England's poets ; and least of all would it 
be a tribute of respect to his memory to revive a prologue 
appended to one of the most chaste of all the great 
master's creations, in which the later poet descends to a 
grossness only too characteristic of the audience for 
which Miranda and Caliban had to be despoiled of that 
on which the innocence of the one, and the simple 
naturalness of the other, mainly depend. If the name 



PREFA CE. 



of the great satirist to whom we owe the ' Absolom and 
Achitophel' is to be associated with Shakespeare's, it 
can be done with a better grace, where he writes to 
Sir Godfrey Kneller in acknowledgement, as is believed, 
of a copy of the Chandos portrait : — 

' Shakespeare, thy gift, I place before my sight ; 
With awe I ask his blessing ere I write; 
With reverence look on his majestic face ; 
Proud to be less, but of his god-like race.' 

It was not till the eighteenth century that Nicholas 
Rowe, the first textual critic of the Shakespearean 
drama, appeared ; and but for the bitter wars of Pope 
and the dunces, — with Warburton, Johnson, Steevens, 
Malone, and all the learned brood of commentators 
following, — Shakespeare might have long been left to 
the mercy of such playwrights as D'Avenant and 
Dryden in the seventeenth, and Garrick and Cibber in 
the eighteenth century. Yet let it never be thought, as 
has too frequently been assumed, that Shakespeare is 
only now for the first time adequately appreciated ; or, 
as others even more grossly affirm, that it was not till 
German critics had revealed his power, that English 
readers learned how great a poet their own Shakespeare 
is. However notorious the failure of his friends and 
literary executors, Heminge and Condell, may have 
been as editors, — and had they executed their task in 
the way it was in their power to have done, with ori- 
ginal manuscripts, stage copies, the memories of living 
actors, and the texts of earlier quartos, to appeal to, 



PREFACE. 



the race of commentators would have had no pretext 

for textual recension ; — yet in high estimation of their 

author's works, it is not easy for any later critic to 

surpass them. There, too, in the same folio, where 

their appreciative preface proves that Shakespeare was 

a true hero even to his fellow players, surly Ben Jonson, 

forgetting all his old irascibilities, writes of his ' star 

of poets ' — 

' Soul of the age, 
The applause ! delight ! the wonder of the stage ! 
My Shakespeare.' 

Another contemporary, Leonard D'igges, in laudatory 
verses of inferior power, but no less sincerity, prefixed 
to a spurious edition of Shakespeare's poems published 
in 1640, bears witness to the delight with which his 
plays were welcomed before all others. His 'Caesar' 
could ravish the audience, when they would not brook 
Jonson's tedious ' Catiline.' His Othello and Falstaff, his 
Beatrice, Benedick, and ' Malvolio, that cross-garter'd 
gull,' would crowd cock-pit, galleries, and boxes, till 
scarce standing-room remained ; when even the choicest 
of Ben Jonson's plays, ' The Fox and subtil Alchymist,' 
could only at long intervals command their merited ova- 
tion ; and so he concludes with the comparison of 'his 
wit-fraught book ' to old coined gold, which by virtue 
of its innate worth will pass current to succeeding ages. 
Shakespeare's writings are indeed a mine of wealth, from 
which the more they are studied the less it will surprise 
us to draw forth treasures new and old ; and here, in his 



PREFACE. 



Caliban, we recover a piece of 'old coin'd gold,' with 
its Elizabethan mint-mark, but with a value for us such 
as Shakespeare himself was unconscious of: like some 
rarest numismatic gem, whose worth in the artistic beauty 
of its die, far exceeds all its weight of sterling gold. 



University College, Toronto, 

July 3, 1872. 



CHAPTER I. 

IN THE BEGINNING. 

'We do but learn to-day what our better-advanced judgments will 
unteach us to-morrow ; and Aristotle doth but instruct us, as Plato 
did him : that is, to confute himself.' — Religio Medici. 

IN the 'Medley' of the Poet-Laureat, when the tale 
of the Princess is closed, with its mock-heroics, its 
bantering burlesque, and its real earnestness, and the 
little feud begins 

' Betwixt the mockers and the realists,' 

Lilia joins entirely with the latter. ' The sequel of the 
tale had touched her,' she sate absorbed, perplexed in 

thought, till 

'Last she fix't 
A showery glance upon her aunt, and said, 
You — tell us what we are; who might have told, 
For she was cramm'd with theories out of books ; ' 

but that the crowd, who had been making a sport of 
science, were swarming at the sunset to take leave ; 
and ere all was quiet again, the stillness gave its fitter 
response to the question, unanswerable by ' theories out 
of books.' 

'So they sat, 
But spoke not, rapt in nameless reverie, 
Perchance upon the future man; the walls 
Blacken'd about us, bats wheel'd, and owls whoop'd, 
And gradually the powers of the night, 
That range above the region of the wind, 
Deepening the courts of twilight, broke them up 
Through all the silent spaces of the worlds, 
Beyond all thought, into the Heaven of heavens.' 
B 



F 



IN THE BEGINNING. 



But this question, ' Whence, and what are we ?' is not 
to be repressed, either by shouting crowds or by brood- 
ing silences. The activity of the reasoning mind within 
us is in no respect more manifest than in the irrepressible 
inquiry into our own origin and that of the universe of 
which we form a part. Every philosophy and every 
faith undertakes some solution of the problem ; and 
childlike as are the fables of primitive cosmogonists, 
they all concur in recognising the evidence of design, 
and so the necessity of a preexistent designer. The 
eternity of matter has indeed had its advocates, as in 
the philosophy of Democritus ; but matter was with 
him no more than the formless void that preceded 
creation. Time began when .the universe was called 
into being ; and its evolution out of chaos was in 
accordance with a purposed plan, and the work of a 
presiding will. 

The order of the universe, as thus recognised, is first 
a supreme infinite intelligence, then lesser finite intel- 
ligences. But the gulf which lies between the finite 
and the infinite is very partially diminished to us by 
any conception we may form of highest finite in- 
telligences, such as antique poetry and mythology 
impersonated in a multitude of fanciful idealisms ; and 
which to our own minds are acceptably presented as 
ministering spirits, symbolised by indestructible fire : 
beings in whom the intellectual element predominates, 
and to whom is committed the ministration of the 
supreme, intelligent, divine will. With such spiritual 
essences science may reasonably disclaim counsel, as 
with things lying wholly beyond its province. But 
man, too, is an intelligent being, in some by no means 
obscure sense made, as such, in the image of God. 
It is indeed well to avoid as far as possible, in scientific 



IN THE BEGINNING. 



discussion, the use of terms which have been appro- 
priated by the theologian. But the human element, 
which Shakespeare calls ' God-like reason,' however we 
may designate it, cannot be ignored ; though by some 
modern lines of reasoning it is made to assume a very 
materialistic origin. From very early times of philo- 
sophical speculation, mind and matter have marshalled 
their rival champions to the field. As Byron jestingly 
puts it : when Berkeley and his followers have said there 
is no matter, the profane realist has responded, it is 
no matter what they say ! But the rival creeds are not 
to be so fused. The feud between the idealists and 
realists, the metaphysicians and the naturalists, is as 
far as ever from being settled ; nor can science limit 
its bounds within any absolute materialism. As soon 
as we take up the question of the origin and descent 
of man we are compelled to deal with the spiritual no 
less than the material element of his being, whatever 
theories we may be tempted to form in accounting for 
the origin of either. 

In attempting to follow up the track of time through 
the field of space, to that point when the universe, which 
was not always there, began to be, two contradictory 
hypotheses seem to offer themselves- to the theorist. 
The eternity of matter may be assumed, with its 
imagined elements in incoherent chaos, awaiting the 
evolution of law and the beginning of organisation. 
But out of this can come no directing or informing 
will. It may seem but a step beyond this, but it is 
a very long one, to start as Lady Psyche does, in her 
introductory harangue to the fair undergraduates of the 
university of the future : — 

' This world was once a fluid haze of light, 
Till toward the centre set the starry tides, 
B 2 



IN THE BEGINNING. 



And eddied into suns, that, wheeling, cast 
The planets; then the monster, then the man: 
Tattoo'd or woaded, winter-clad in skins, 
Raw from the prime.' 

On the other hand, if the ancient maxim holds good, 
that nothing can come out of nothing, it seems not less 
but more scientific to start with the preoccupation of 
the mighty void with the Eternal Mind. The con- 
ception of such a Supreme Divine Intelligence seems 
to commend itself to finite reason. It is easier to con- 
ceive of the eternity of God than of His coming into 
being. But if 'first mind, then matter,' be thus the 
order of the universe, how are we to reconcile with it 
the inductions of modern science, in such a total reversal 
of this order in the process of creation of mind as is 
implied in the development of the intellectual, moral, 
and spiritual elements of man, through the same natural 
selection by which his physical evolution is traced, step 
by step, from the very lowest organic forms ? 

The contrast which this hypothesis presents to older 
theories of evolution, is nowhere better shown than in 
the musings of the old sage of Norwich. In his ' Religio 
Medici ' he deals, after his own quaint fashion, with the 
oracles of antiquity, the supernatural of popular belief, 
and the spiritual beings set forth in revelation. For 
angelic natures he entertains a reverent regard undreamt 
of in our age of positivisms and spiritualisms. He 
doubts not that ' those noble essences in heaven bear a 
friendly regard unto their fellow-natures on earth ; ' and 
therefore he believes that ' those many prodigies and 
ominous prognostics which forerun the ruin of states, 
princes, and private persons, are the charitable pre- 
monitions of good angels.' It was due, no doubt, to such 
calm philosophisings, that, in the very crisis of England's 
and Charles the First's fate, he left the state and its 



IN THE BEGINNING. 



prince to the charity of such good angels, and busied 
himself with his ' Pseudodoxia Epidemica ' or inquiries 
into many commonly presumed truths, and vulgar and 
common errors. But having in this tranquil fashion 
mused on the character and functions of angelic essences, 
he passes to a refinement of the Platonic idea of ' an 
universal and common spirit to the whole world,' the 
Divine Source by whose almighty fiat the void was filled, 
the darkness made light, and the light responded to by 
a world of life. The quaint medicist then refers anew 
to the angelic beings who owe their existence to the 
same divine source, as certainly the masterpieces of the 
Creator, the flower, or perfect bloom of 'what we are 
but in hopes and probability ; for,' he adds, ' we are 
only that amphibious piece between corporal and 
spiritual essence, that middle form that links those two 
together, and makes good the method of God and 
nature, that jumps not from extremes, but unites the 
incompatible distances by some middle and participating 
natures.' 

The mystical fancies of the old physician reflect ideas 
of an elder time, when faith had in it much of refined 
simplicity and somewhat also of credulity ; and in which 
genius dealt reverently yet fearlessly with many pro- 
blems that anew invite our solution. Sir Thomas Browne 
is as one born out of due time. He presents in unique 
combination some of the most characteristic features of 
the previous age : the age of Camden, Hooker, and 
Donne ; of Bacon and Hobbes ; of Spenser, Sidney, 
Lilly and Shakespeare. He is especially noticeable for 
a learned conceit in his choice of words, and a quaintness 
of phrase, such as Lilly had commended, and Shake- 
speare ridiculed, even while turning it to account. But 
still more does he link the age that preceded with the 



IN THE BEGINNING. 



one to which, in point of time, he belonged, by the 
singular interblending of scepticism with a devout cre- 
dulity : as where he declines to dispute the question 
as to whether Eve was formed out of the left side of 
Adam ; or whether ' Adam was an hermaphrodite, as 
the Rabbins contend upon the letter of the text, because 
it is contrary to reason that there should be an her- 
maphrodite before there was a woman.' In this and 
like manner he glances in inconsequential fashion at 
thoughts which are now presented to all minds in 
clearest definition : accepting without difficulty what 
no one will now credit, and rejecting unhesitatingly 
what is now assumed as indisputable. 

It was a transitional age, in which liberty was running 
into licence, and nonconformity was persecuted rather 
because its austerity offended the licentiousness of the 
times, than that its creed ran counter to any recognisable 
belief of the new era. The nonconformity which re- 
ceives least toleration in our own day lies under the ban 
of science far more than of theology. The Church has 
grown so broad, that it becomes a puzzle to define what 
might constitute heresy, or may not prove to be or- 
thodoxy within its pale. But outside of its consecrated 
bounds science has established its accredited beliefs, 
as by a new Council of Nice ; and woe to the heretic 
who ventures to question its dogmas. Its new hypotheses 
are pronounced by most of its exponents to be infinitely 
probable, and by many of them to be absolutely demon- 
strated. With a generous denouncement of all intoler- 
ance, the modern evolutionist presents his axioms to 
the questioner, and passes on. Infallibility has deserted 
the chair of St. Peter, and finds itself at home on a 
new throne. It is perilous to mediate in the inquiries 
which now occupy a foremost place in deduction, in- 



// \ 



IN THE BEGINNING. 



duction, and scientific research. There are indeed 
among the leaders of thought, men of calm judicial 
sobriety, whose decisions are presented in so attractive 
a form as to invite from the thoughtful mind the most 
careful examination before they are rejected. But it 
is otherwise with the crowd of followers, who have been 
dazzled by the novelty of the new theory of evolution, 
and are animated with all the zeal of young converts. 
We own to being charmed with the theory of the origin 
of species, to having recognised in it the key to a 
thousand difficulties in natural history ; but all is vain, 
unless the whole hypothesis of the descent of man, the 
evolution of mind, and every step in the pedigree by 
which he is traced back to the remotest of his new- 
found ancestry, be accepted as indisputable fact. 

In such a stage of argument it is advantageous to be 
able to appeal on any point to an impartial umpire; 
and it may prove of value to compare the poetical 
imaginings of an age rich in genius of the highest order 
with the matter-of-fact realism of our own day. It 
suited the quaint philosophic mysticism of Sir Thomas 
Browne to conceive of man as the intermediate link 
between spiritual essences and mere animal life ; but 
M. Louis Figuier puts forth, in his^ ' Day after Death,' 
with all the gravity of a pure induction of science, the 
latest scheme of psychical evolution, in which he traces 
a refining and sublimated humanity from planet to 
planet in ever-renewing resurrection, until, freed from 
its last earthly taint in the final solar abode of perfected 
souls, it shall there 'lie immortal in the arms of fire.' 
This demonstration of 'our future life according to 
science,' is neither offered to us as religious musings, 
like those of Sir Thomas Browne ; nor as the sport of 
scientific fancy, such as the dying philosopher, Sir 



IN THE BEGINNING. 



Humphrey Davy, wrought into the ingenious day- 
dream which beguiled his last hours. The Frenchman 
belongs to a scientific age; writes in an era of revolution, 
in which many old things are passing away ; imagines 
himself strictly inductive; and publishes to the world 
his fanciful speculations on a whole cycle of evolutions, 
as a new gospel : the latest revelation of science and 
the most comprehensive scheme of future development. 
It has one special use at least, in which it is, so far, 
a counterpart to Sir Humphrey Davy's ' Last Days 
of a Philosopher.' It suffices to illustrate the barrenness 
of the most ambitious fancy, with all the aids that 
science can command, in every effort to realise that 
other life, which ' it hath not entered into the heart 
of man to conceive.' 

But what imagination utterly fails to do as an in- 
duction based on supposed scientific foundations, the 
creative fancy of the true poet, working within its own 
legitimate sphere, has accomplished to better purpose. 
Not, indeed, that the unseen world, and the spiritual life 
beyond the grave, are any nearer to the gifted poet 
than to the humblest believer to whom the realities of 
that higher state of existence are objects of faith : but 
in those stages of real or hypothetical evolution, and the 
transitional states of being which their assumption in- 
volves, fancy has to play its part under whatever severe 
restraints of scientific judgment. The comprehensive 
faith which his novel doctrines involve, makes ever new 
demands on the cultivated imaginings of the man of 
science ; and it requires a mind of rare balance to pre- 
serve the fancy in due subordination to the actual de- 
monstrations of scientific truth. But if it were possible 
to free the imagination from the promptings, alike of 
seductive hypotheses and of the severer inductions of 



IN THE BEGINNING. 



science, and so have its own realisations of the possible 
and the probable to compare with those assumed actual 
anthropomorphic beings of a remote past with which 
man is now affirmed to have such intimate genealogical 
relations, the result would be one to be welcomed by 
every lover of truth. We should then be able to place 
alongside of such creations of a well-regulated fancy, the 
wholly independent deductions of scientific speculation 
and research : whereas now the fancy of the evolu- 
tionist is subject to all the dictations of a preconceived 
theory; and he realises for himself, as an undoubted link 
in the pedigree of humanity, such a being as seems 
wholly inconceivable to another class of cultivated 
minds. To the one, this imaginary being, ' the progeni- 
tor of man,' seems as monstrous as the centaurs with 
which the art of Phidias enriched the metopes of the 
Parthenon ; to the other, every doubt, not merely of its 
possible, but of its actual existence, appears the mere 
offspring of prejudice. 

Happily for the impartial inquirer, such an unbiassed 
conception of the intermediate being, lower than man, as 
man is ' a little lower than the angels,' is no vain dream 
of modern doubt. The not wholly irrational brute, the 
animal -approximating in form and attributes as nearly 
to man as the lower animal may be supposed to do 
while still remaining a brute, has actually been con- 
ceived for us with all the perfection of an art more real 
and suggestive than that of the chisel of Phidias, in one 
of the most original creations of the Shakespearean 
drama. 

The world has known no age of bolder inquiry, or 
freer liberty of thought, than the sixteenth century. 
The men of that grand era knew both how to question 
and how to believe, and were able to give a reason for 



IN THE BEGINNING. 



the faith that was in them. This manly faith, no less 
than the vigorous freedom of intellect of that age, is 
reflected in the pages of Spenser and Shakespeare, even 
more than in many of the theological writings of the 
time. With the seventeenth century a change began. 
Two of the most independent thinkers that have ap- 
peared in modern Europe, Bacon and Hobbes, entered 
on their labours, and gave a new bias to thought and 
reasoning. The one undertook an analytical classifica- 
tion of human knowledge, and aimed at supplementing 
the ancient or Aristotelian logic in such a way as to 
check the reasoner from making undue deductions from 
the premises before him. The Baconian method may 
not suffice as a fitting instrument for all the ample de- 
mands of modern science; but it never was more need- 
ful than now to require with strictest severity that the 
inferences we magnify into demonstrations shall be fully 
sustained by the premises on which they are founded. 
The other, Hobbes, with close and consistent reasoning, 
took up the department of mental philosophy, and, 
amid many ethical theories only too consistent with 
modern ideas of the evolution of mind, furnished con- 
tributions to the science of mental philosophy, the full 
value of which was not perceived by his own age. But 
he was an incomplete moralist. His utilitarian theories 
were based on a standard far below that of the Eliza- 
bethan age. He belonged unmistakably, in his whole 
reasonings as a moralist, to the era of decline. His 
writings, as well as those of Bacon, abound with reflex 
characteristics of that elder time ; but they no less 
clearly indicate that its earnestness had passed away. 
Yet its influence long survived, and it is even more 
curious to recognise the same faith and Puritan theology 
of the sixteenth century reflected in the satires of 



IN THE BEGINNING. 



Dryden, than in the ethics of Hobbes, or the quaint 
musings of Sir Thomas Browne. 

' That we are the breath and similitude of God,' writes 
the author of ' Religio Medici,' ' it is indisputable, and 
upon record of Holy Scripture ; but to call ourselves a 
microcosm, or little world, I thought it only a pleasant 
trope of rhetoric, till my near judgment and second 
thoughts told me there was a real truth therein. For 
first, we are a rude mass, and in the rank of creatures 
which only are, and have a dull kind of being not yet 
privileged with life, or preferred to sense or reason ; next 
we live the life of plants, the life of animals, the life of 
men, and at last the life of spirits, running on in one 
mysterious nature those five kind of existences, which 
comprehend the creatures not only of the world, but of 
the universe.' Here we have unmistakable glimmerings 
of Lamarckian and other theories of metamorphosis, 
evolution, and progression. 

But long before the author of the ' Religio Medici ' had 
penned his ingenious musings on the development of the 
human microcosm, Shakespeare had presented, in the 
clear mirror of his matchless realisations alike of the 
natural and supernatural, the vivid conception of ' that 
amphibious piece between corporal and spiritual essence,' 
by which, according to modern hypothesis, the human 
mind is conjoined in nature and origin with the very 
lowest forms of vital organism. The greatest of poets, 
who seems to grow ever more wise and more true as 
growing wisdom helps new generations to appreciate his 
worth, has thus left for us materials not without their 
value in discussing, even prosaically and literally, the 
imaginary perfectibility of the irrational brute ; the 
imaginable degradation of rational man. Since Shake- 
speare's day a school of didactic poets has merged into 



IN THE BEGINNING. 



a philosophical and metaphysical one ; and the most 
objective poet of this metaphysical school has, in his 
' Caliban upon Setebos ; or, Natural Theology in the 
Island,' dealt with a new ideal of the same intermediate 
being, shaped according to the beliefs and fancies of 
later generations. 

Those realisations of the same rational brute, in its 
aboriginal habitat, in contact with the informing intelli- 
gence of a higher nature, and in conflict with the doubts 
which appear as the natural twin of new-born reason : 
present us with conceptions, by two widely differing 
minds, responding to the influences of eras no less dis- 
similar. The object aimed at in the following chapters 
is to place the conceptions of modern science in relation 
to the assumed brute progenitor of man, alongside of 
those imaginative picturings, and of the whole world of 
fancy and superstition pertaining to that elder time ; 
while also, the literary excellences, and the textual diffi- 
culties of the two dramas of Shakespeare chiefly appealed 
to in illustration of the scientific element of inquiry, are 
made the subjects of careful study. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION. 

' What seest thou else 
In the dark backward and abysm of time? 
If thou remember'st aught ere thou earnest here, 
How thou earnest here thou mayst.' — The Tempest. 

IT is a pleasant fancy, due to the poet Campbell, that 
' The Tempest ' of Shakespeare, which stands first in 
the earliest collected edition of his dramas, has a special 
sacredness, as in reality the last of the great magician's 
works ; and that in the sage Prospero, holding nature in 
all her most mysterious attributes subject to his will, 
yet on the very eve of yielding up this sway, the poet 
unconsciously pictured himself. In the plenitude of 
his power, with all his wondrous genius at command, he 
wrought this exquisite work of art ; and that done, the 
wizard staff was broken, and silence displaced the 
heavenly music it had wrought. It is not of moment 
for our purposed criticism that this should be proved. 
It suffices that the work in question is universally ac- 
knowledged as one peculiarly inspired with the poetry 
of nature and the creative power of genius. The scene 
of this remarkable drama is laid on a nameless island ; 
the actors are beings of air and of earth ; but pre- 
eminently for us, the island has a being of its own, 
native-born, its sole aboriginal inhabitant : — 

'Then was this island — 
Save for the son that she did litter here, 
A freckled whelp, hag-born, — not honour'd with 
A human shape.' 



THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION. 



The poor monster — sole lord of his nameless island in 
an unknown sea,— has excited mingled feelings of 
wonder, admiration, and disgust. But the latter feeling 
must be transient with all but the superficial student. 
With truer appreciation, Franz Horn has said : ' In spite 
of his imperfect, brutish, half-human nature, Caliban is 
something marvellously exciting, and as pretender to 
the sovereignty of the island ridiculously sublime. He 
is inimitable as a creation of the most powerful poetic 
fancy ; and the longer the character is studied the more 
marvellous does' it appear.' It is by reason of this im- 
perfect, brutish, half-human nature, that Caliban anew 
invites our study, in relation to disclosures of science 
undreamt of in that age which witnessed his marvellous 
birth. 

The idea of beings, monstrous and brutal in every 
physical characteristic, and yet in some not clearly 
defined sense human, as the inhabitants of strange 
lands, was familiar not only in Shakespeare's day but 
long before. Medieval chroniclers describe the Huns 
who ravaged Germany, Italy, and France in the ninth 
and tenth centuries, as hideous, boar-tusked, child- 
devouring ogres ; and after somewhat the same type, 
Marco Polo represents the Andaman Islanders as 'a 
most brutish, savage race, having heads, eyes, and teeth 
resembling those of the canine species : ' cruel cannibals 
who ate human flesh raw, and devoured every one on 
whom they could lay their hands. Yet after all, much 
of this was only an exaggeration of the actual savage, 
such as he is to be met with even in our own day. 

An older English writer, the famous traveller, Sir 
John Mandeville, who commenced his wanderings in 
1322, tells how he had 'ben long tyme over the see, 
and seyn and gon thorgh manye dyverse londes, and 



THE C A LIB AX OF EVOLUTION. 



many provynces and kyngdomes and iles : where 
dwellen many dyverse folk, and of dyverse maneres and 
lawes, and of dyverse schappes of men ; of whiche I shalle 
speke more pleynly hereafter.' And so he accordingly 
does: telling, for example, of 'the land of Bacharie, where 
be full evil folk and full cruel. In that country been 
many Ipotaynes, that dwell sometimes in the water 
and sometimes on the land : half-man and half-horse, 
and they eat men when they may take them.' Besides 
these, he also describes the griffons of the same country, 
half-eagle, half-lion, but so large that they carry off a 
horse or couple of oxen to their nest ; in proof of which 
Mandeville tells us, the griffon's talons are as big as 
great oxen's horns, ' so that men maken cuppes of hem 
to drynken of.' No doubt Milton had Mandeville's 
griffon in view when he compared the fiend to this 
monster, as he laboriously winged his way up from 
the nethermost abyss of Hell. 

Of the like travellers' tales of more modern date, 
there will be occasion to speak by and by. The classi- 
fication of men by the naturalists of Mandeville's and 
Marco Polo's days, was into Christians and infidels ; and 
it seemed then not only natural, but most logical, to 
conceive of the latter as of betusked ogres, hippo- 
centaurs, or any other monstrous half-brutish and wholly 
devilish humanity. But a different ideal of imperfect 
transitional human beings originated at a later date in 
the very natural exaggerations of gorilla, chimpanzee, 
or orang, as first seen or reported of in their native 
haunts. 

If ' The Tempest ' was indeed the latest production of 
Shakespeare's pen, then the date of that most amusing 
old book of travels, ' Purchas his Pilgrimage,' closely 
corresponds in point of time with its appearance on the 



THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION. 



English stage. Published in 1613, that is within less 
than three years before Shakespeare's death, its author 
embodies among its miscellaneous contents, the story 
of his friend, Andrew Battle, who while a serjeant in the 
service of the Portugese, in the kingdom of Congo, on 
quarrelling with his masters fled to the woods, where he 
lived eight or nine months ; and there he saw ' a kinde 
of great apes, if they might be so termed, of the height 
of a man, but twice as bigge in feature of their limmes, 
with strength proportionable, hairie all over, otherwise 
altogether like men and women in their whole bodily 
shape.' At a later date Purchas described more 
minutely the pongo, a huge brute-man, sleeping in the 
trees, building a roof to shelter himself from the rain, 
and living wholly on fruits and nuts. ' They cannot 
speake,' he says, ' and have no understanding more than 
a beast. The people of the countrie, when they travail 
in the woods, make fires where they sleepe in the night ; 
and in the morning, when they are gone, the pongoes 
will come and sit about the fire till it goeth out ; for 
they have no understanding to lay the wood together.' 

This may suffice to illustrate the ' wild men ' who, 
with greater or less exaggeration, figure in the traveller's 
tales of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They 
attract us now with a fresh interest, when we are being 
taught by novel inductions of science to look, in recent 
or tertiary life, for some such link between the lowest 
type of savage man and the highest of the anthro- 
pomorpha. In truth we have the best scientific authority 
for affirming that the differences between man and the 
chimpanzee, according to all recognised physical tests, 
are much less than those which separate that anthropoid 
ape from lower quadrumana. So much less indeed are 
they, that, compared limb with limb and brain with 



THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION. 



brain, the result may well raise a doubt as to the fitness 
of a test which admits of such close affinities physically, 
and such enormous diversities morally and intellectually. 
If, however, man is but this ' quintessence of dust,' ' the 
paragon of animals,' estimable in utmost requisite com- 
prehensibility by the test of physical structure, then it is 
well that all should learn to 

' Admire such wisdom in an earthly shape, 
And show a Newton as we show an ape.' 

Linnaeus indeed, with intuitive foresight anticipating 
modern naturalists, long hesitated whether to rank the 
chimpanzee as a second species of the genus Homo, or as 
first among apes. But the Swedish naturalist could 
not speak from personal observation; and indeed placed 
too implicit faith in the exaggerated, if not wholly 
fabulous accounts of a female animal of human propor- 
tions and pleasing features, but covered with hair, the 
Orang outang, sive Homo Sylvestris, as furnished by 
Bontius and later writers. But there is a long step 
between the classificatory idea of Linnaeus and the 
modern doctrine of the Descent of Man. To recognise 
that man and the ape are both animals, and so to 
determine their classification in the same animal king- 
dom solely by means of physical tests on which the 
whole system is based, is one thing ; to assume that 
man is but the latest phase of development in a pro- 
gressive scale of evolution, of which the ape is an earlier 
stage, is the other and more startling affirmation which 
is permeating the minds of the present generation of 
thinkers, and revolutionising the science of the nine- 
teenth century. 

With cautious reticence, the author of ' The Origin of 
Species by means of Natural Selection ' continued to 
c 



THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION. 



accumulate evidence as to the origin or descent of man, 
while freely communicating to the world all other proofs 
leading up, as he conceives, to that end. He not only- 
hesitated to startle and prejudice his readers against 
the novel system as a whole, by publishing what 
nevertheless seemed to him the inevitable deduction 
from his general views, but he had determined to 
withhold that crowning result of his research. Yet as 
he had indicated in no obscure fashion, in his earlier 
work, that man must be included with all other beings 
in the new theory of the origin of species : no wonder 
that his disciples hastened to break through prudential 
restraints, and proclaim in undisguised simplicity the 
doctrine of affinities and genealogy, by which we are 
taught to conceive of a remote marine group of her- 
maphrodites diverging into two great branches, the one 
in retrograde descent producing the present class of 
Ascidians, hardly recognisable as animals ; the other 
giving birth to the vertebrata, and so to man himself. 

Of the latest ramifications in this genealogical tree, 
its discoverer tells us, ' there can hardly be a doubt 
that man is an offshoot from the old-world simian 
stem ; and that, under a genealogical point of view, he 
must be classed with the catarhine division,' or old- 
world monkeys, with their more human-like nostrils, 
dentition, and other minor characteristics. ' If,' con- 
tinues Mr. Darwin, 'the anthropomorphous apes be 
admitted to form a natural sub-group, then as man 
agrees with them, not only in all those characters which 
he possesses in common with the whole catarhine group, 
but in other peculiar characters, such as the absence of 
a tail, and of callosities, and in general appearance, we 
may infer that some ancient member of the anthropo- 
morphous sub-group gave birth to man.' And he adds 



THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION. 



thus further : ' No doubt man, in comparison with most 
of his allies, has undergone an extraordinary amount of 
modification, chiefly in consequence of his greatly- 
developed brain and erect position : nevertheless, we 
should bear in mind that he is but one of several excep- 
tional forms of primates.' 

The extremely remote progenitor of man was thus a 
catarhine monkey, probably dwelling in those African 
regions which were formerly inhabited by extinct apes 
closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee. As, how- 
ever, the Dryopithecus of Lartet, an ape nearly as large 
as a man, and closely allied to the anthropomorphous 
Hylobates, existed in Europe during the Upper Miocene 
period, when oceans of the present time were solid land, 
and continents of our present globe were buried below 
Jong-extinct oceans, we can very vaguely surmise as to 
the locality which, under the assumed process of evo- 
lution, gave birth to our progenitor. 

But while the wanderings of the world's gray fathers 
in such inconceivably remote and dark ages are hard to 
trace, their forms reveal themselves with no vague 
uncertainty to the scientific seer. ' The early progeni- 
tors of man,' says Mr. Darwin, 'were no doubt once 
covered with hair, both sexes having beards : their ears 
were pointed and capable of movement, and their bodies 
were provided with a tail having the proper muscles.' 
They had numerous other characteristics normally 
present in living quadrumana, but now not ordinarily to 
be looked for in man. But of this also Mr. Darwin 
speaks as beyond doubt, that our progenitors were 
arboreal in their habits, frequenting some warm, forest- 
clad land ; and the males provided with great canine 
teeth, which served as formidable weapons for assault 
and defence. 

C 2 



THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION. 



The being which thus rises in clear vision to the 
mind's eye as the product of this theory of evolution, is 
not man, but only man's progenitor. He is still irrational 
and dumb, or at best only entering on the threshold of 
that transitional stage of anthropomorphism which is to 
transform him into the rational being endowed with 
speech. To the author of ' The Descent of Man/ how- 
ever, it does not appear altogether incredible that some 
unusually wise ape-like animal should have thought of 
imitating the growl of a beast of prey, so as to indicate 
to his fellow-monkeys the nature of the expected danger; 
and so, with forethought and reasoning thus fairly at 
work, and even perhaps a benevolent regard for the 
interests of his weaker and less-experienced fellow- 
monkeys, — which would indicate something of a moral 
sense already present, — the first step is taken in the 
formation of a language for the coming man. 

To all appearance, the further process in the assumed 
descent — or, as we might more fitly call it here, the 
ascent, — of man from the purely animal to the rational 
and intellectual stage, is but a question of brain develop- 
ment ; and this cerebral growth is the assigned source 
of the manward progress : not a result of any functional 
harmonising of mind and brain, Man as compared 
with the anthropomorphous apes has ' undergone an 
extraordinary amount of modification, chiefly in con- 
sequence of his greatly developed brain' It is difficult 
to dissociate from such an idea the further conclu- 
sion, that reason and mind are no more than the 
action of the enlarged brain ; yet this is not neces- 
sarily implied. The mind must communicate with the 
outer world by the senses ; and within those gateways 
of knowledge must lie a brain of adequate compass 
to receive and turn to account the impressions con- 



THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION. 



veyed to it. The brain is certainly the organ of 
reasoning, the vital instrument through which the 
mind acts ; but it need not therefore be assumed that 
brain and mind are one. The microcephalic idiot may 
have dormant mental powers only requiring an ade- 
quate organisation for rational activity. The imprisoned 
soul may be only awaiting the emancipation of death 
to enter upon its true life. 

In the deductions based on comparative anatomy, 
cerebral bulk and structure have necessarily played an 
important part. The more carefully the human brain 
has been compared with those of the anthropomorpha, 
the tendency has been to diminish the distinctive 
features, apart from absolute size. The brain of man, 
in a healthy, normal state, ranges from one hundred 
and fifteen to fifty-five cubic inches. The lowest of 
these numbers is, therefore, the point of comparison 
with the most highly developed brute. Midway be- 
tween it and the highest cerebral development of the 
latter, lies the intermediate, hypothetical ' man's pro- 
genitor,' the Caliban of Science. In the gorilla, accord- 
ing to the trustworthy authority of Professor Huxley, the 
volume of brain rises to nearly thirty-five cubic inches; 
the human brain at its lowest is fifty-five. Twenty 
cubic inches, therefore, is the whole interval to be 
bridged over. Yet narrow as it seems, on one side of 
this gulf is the irrational ape, on the other side is man. 

This brain-test has been made the subject of much 
controversy and of very conflicting opinions. Pro- 
fessor Owen sought to make it the basis of a system 
of classification, in which, by means of cerebral charac- 
teristics, he assigned to the genus Homo not merely a 
distinct order, but a sub-class of the mammalia, to 
which he gave the name Archencephala. But the 



THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION. 



assumed differences, otherwise than in actual volume, 
have been nearly all rejected by some of the highest 
authorities in comparative anatomy. As to mere bulk, 
the volume of brain, of the gorilla, for example, must be 
regarded relatively to the size of the animal ; but in all 
most notable characteristics we have the authority of 
Professor Huxley for asserting that ' the brain of man 
differs far less from that of the chimpanzee than that of 
the latter does from the pig's brain.' 

The essential difference between man and the ape, 
then, as tested by the brain, chiefly rests on superiority 
in relative size ; and the process of transition in 
this respect is mainly, if not entirely, one of growth. 
But the most ancient human crania hitherto recovered, 
such as that from the Engis Cave, near Liege, and 
the most degraded types, approximating in any con- 
siderable degree to an ape-like form, as the Neander- 
thal skull, betray no corresponding diminution of cere- 
bral mass. The latter is described by Mr. Busk as 
' the most brutal of all known human skulls, resembling 
those of the apes not only in the prodigious develop- 
ment of the superciliary prominences, and the forward 
extension of the orbits, but still more in the depressed 
form of the brain-case, in the straightness of the squa- 
mosal suture, and in the complete retreat of the occiput 
forward and upward, from the superior occipital ridges.' 
This skull, however, has no such antiquity as can give it 
any legitimate claim to rank as the transitional brute- 
man ; while its cerebral capacity is estimated at seventy- 
five cubic inches. So far, therefore, as the mass of brain 
is concerned, it exceeds that of many living savages, 
and of not a few Europeans. The fossil remains of man 
hitherto recovered are assigned to no older deposits than 
those of the Later Tertiary, or the Quaternary period, 



THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION. 



or contemporary with animals of the post-glacial epoch. 
Remote as those are, according to all ordinary esti- 
mates of the antiquity of man, their disclosures are ac- 
knowledged to lend little countenance to the doctrine 
of progressive development from lower simian forms ; 
and the evolutionist now relegates his hypothetical 
evidence of man's brute progenitor to geological ages 
even more removed from the glacial epoch than that 
is from our own. Sir Charles Lyell has expressed his 
belief in the probable recovery of human remains in 
the Pliocene strata ; but there he pauses. In the Miocene 
period, he conceives, ' had some other rational being 
representing man then flourished, some signs of his exist- 
ence could hardly have escaped unnoticed, in the shape of 
implements of stone and metal, more frequent and more 
durable than the osseous remains of any of the mam- 
malia.' But Sir John Lubbock will by no means allow 
the line to be so drawn. ' If,' he says, ' man constitutes 
a separate family of mammalia, as he does in the opinion 
of the highest authorities, then, according to all palason- 
tological analogies, he must have had representatives in 
Miocene times. We need not, however, expect to find 
the proofs in Europe ; our nearest relatives in the 
animal kingdom are confined to hot, almost tropical 
climates, and it is in such countries that we must look 
for the earliest traces of the human race.' There, accord- 
ingly, the expectant palaeontologist anticipates the dis- 
covery of the Caliban of evolution, whose fossil skeleton, 
of strange unperfected humanity, with intermediate 
cerebral development between ape and man, may yet 
displace the Guadeloupe slab, and claim the place of 
honour among the choicest treasures of the British 
Museum. 

But the brain, to which we as definitely assign the 



2+ THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION. 

work of thinking and reasoning, as to the eye that of 
seeing, and to the ear that of hearing — or, more strictly, 
of conveying the impressions of sight and hearing to the 
brain, and so to the mind, — seems to fail us as any guide 
or key to an evolutionary classification. When we turn 
to the variations in the lower forms of animal life, the 
relative volume of brain furnishes no index of the enor- 
mous contrast ultimately ascribed to its full develop- 
ment. The brain of the orang and chimpanzee is about 
twenty-six inches in volume, or half the minimum 
size assigned to the normal human brain. That of the 
gibbon and baboon is still less; while, on the other hand, 
in the gorilla, as already shown, the volume of brain 
rises to nearly thirty-five cubic inches ; or, in other 
words, between the brain of the orang or chimpanzee 
and that^of the gorilla there is nearly half the difference 
by which, according to this cerebral test, the latter is 
separated^ from man. The capacity of fifty-five cubic 
inches as the lowest normal human brain is that assigned 
by Professor Huxley, while thirty-five cubic inches is the 
volume of brain in the gorilla. In cranial characteristics, 
as well as in dentition, and in the proportional size of 
the arms, the chimpanzee is liker man than the gorilla ; 
and in certain special cerebral details, and especially 
in the form of the cerebral hemispheres, as well as in 
other less important elements of structure, the orang 
still more nearly resembles man. But in point of cere- 
bral volume, the gorilla approaches him by nearly half 
the difference between the two, as compared with that 
which distinguishes it from the chimpanzee or orang. 
Man thus stands in relation to the gorilla as fifty-five 
to thirty-five. Between the brain of the gorilla and 
that of the chimpanzee or orang there is nearly half 
this difference in its favour : thirty-five to twenty-six 



THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION, 



cubic inches. Yet we look in vain for corresponding traces 
of augmented intelligence or approximation to reason. 
But, as water at two hundred and twelve degrees sud- 
denly passes beyond the boiling point into vapour : so 
at some undetermined degree in this cerebral scale, be- 
tween thirty-five and fifty-five, the point is reached at 
which the irrational brute flashes into the living soul. 

If the premises can be accepted, the results follow 
by very simple evolution. Given the requisite brain- 
development ; and, if mental power, reason, moral sense, 
language, and all else that makes man man, are but pro- 
ducts of the larger brain : then the process by which the 
ape grew ' unusually wise,' and the next step, and all 
subsequent steps by which it passed into the so-called 
' progenitor of man,' and so onward to man himself, 
are conceivable. The mere fact indeed of being hairy, 
having ears pointed and capable of motion, or even 
being provided with a tail and every caudal muscle, 
need no more conflict with the idea of a reasoning 
reflecting being endowed with speech, than the flat- 
tened nose, prognathous jaws, oblique pelvis, or any 
other known approximation to types of degradation. 

It is pleasant to associate the noble presence of 
Shakespeare with his matchless drama ; yet physical 
beauty is no needful complement of' intellectual power. 
Socrates was none the less fitted to be the master of 
Plato, though his ungainly features and disproportioned 
body suggested the ideal satyr, and made him the butt 
of Aristophanes on the Athenian comic stage. But 
the hairy covering, the prognathous jaws and formid- 
able canine teeth, with all else that pertain to the 
true brute, are no deformities so long as they are the 
indices of functions essential to the well-being of the 
animal. What we do recognise is, on the one hand, 



THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION. 



the irrational creature naturally provided with clothing, 
— hairy, woolly, feathery, or the like, — armed and fur- 
nished in its own structure with every needful tool ; 
and endowed with the requisite weaving, cell-making, 
mining, nest-building instincts, independent of all in- 
struction, experience, or accumulated knowledge. On 
the other hand is Man, naked, unarmed, unprovided 
with tools, naturally the most helpless, defenceless of 
animals ; but, by means of his reason, clothing, arming, 
housing himself, and assuming the mastery over the 
whole irrational creation, as well as over inanimate 
nature. With the aid of fire he can adapt not only 
the products but the climates of the most widely 
severed latitudes to his requirements. He cooks, and 
the ample range of animal and vegetable life in every 
climate yields him wholesome nutriment. Wood, bone, 
flint, shells, stone, and at length the native and wrought 
metals, arm him, furnish him with tools, — with steam- 
ships, railroads, telegraphic cables. He is lord of all 
this nether world. 

Is this being really no more than the latest de- 
velopment of the other ? Is there not still a missing 
link, forged though it has seemed to be by the 
creative fancy of the scientific speculator ? It is not 
merely that intermediate transitional forms are wanting : 
the far greater difficulty remains, by any legitimate 
process of induction to realise that evolution which 
consistently links by natural gradation the brute in 
absolute subjection to the laws of matter, and the 
rational being ruling over animate and inanimate 
nature by force of intellect. Very true it may be, as 
Mr. Darwin says, that ' if man had not been his own 
classifier, he would never have thought of founding a 
separate order for his own reception.' That is to say, 



THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION, 



the irrational classifier would necessarily have excluded 
the unknown element of reason as a basis of classifi- 
cation. But does this not amount to the very fact 
that man does stand apart, as the only reasoning, 
intelligent, classifying animal ? He is conscious of an 
element peculiar to himself, distinguishing him, not 
in degree, but radically, from the very wisest of apes. 
The reasoning faculty — whether it be the mere large 
brain-power, or something as essentially distinct as that 
which ' smiles at the drawn dagger and defies its 
point,' — lies beyond the ken of any such anthropoid 
classifier. Yet reason may, on that very account, be 
a more distinctive element than hand, foot, pelvis, 
vertebrae, brain, or any other structural characteristic. 

As the metaphysician appears at times to become 
sceptical as to the very existence of matter, so a too 
exclusive devotion to physical science is apt even more 
to remove the metaphysical and psychical beyond all 
practical recognition in the reasonings of the physicist. 
Hence the spiritual element in man seems to dwindle 
into insignificance in the argument of the evolution- 
ists. There is an unconscious evasion of the real 
difficulty in their conception of a transitional half- 
brute, half-man ; an illusive literalness, like the fancy 
of Milton, when from the Earth's fertile womb 

' Now half appeared 
The tawny lion, pawing to get free 
His hinder parts.' 

The difficulty is not to conceive of the transitional 
form, but of the transitional mind. After all has been 
most strongly dwelt upon which seems to degrade the 
brutified Australian Bushman, Andaman Islander, or 
other lowest type of human savage, he is still human. 
It can with no propriety be said of him that he 



THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION. 



has only doubtfully attained to the rank of manhood. 
The ape, caught young, may be taught some very 
notable tricks. The young savage, whenever he has 
been subjected to adequate training, has shown a fair 
capacity, at the least, for such intellectual culture as 
is familiar to the English peasant. The savage is in 
no transitional stage. The mental faculties are dormant, 
not undeveloped. The active energies of his mind are 
expended in dealing with the exigencies of life. Take 
the Patagonian, the Red Indian, or the Esquimaux : 
his whole energies are exhausted in providing the 
means of existence. If his exertions are remitted he 
pays the forfeit with his life. So is it with the 
Australian. Intellect is the means with which he 
fights the battle of life. The ingenuity shown in all 
needful arts is great : in his bags, baskets, nets for 
fishing and bird-catching, his spear and boomerang. 
Nor is even his aesthetic faculty to be despised. The 
ornamentation of his weapons is tasteful and elaborate, 
while the carvings on rocks, of animate and inanimate 
forms in considerable detail, are far from contemp- 
tible. Moreover these latter are by no means mere 
products of idle pastime. Like the corresponding 
gravings of the American savage, they embody the 
rudiments of written language, the first stage of that 
ideography through which the hieroglyphics of Egypt 
passed into the true phonetics of Phoenician and 
Greek, Roman and English alphabets. 

After all the minuteness of modern research, then, 
into the degradation of the savage, he is still no less 
man than ourselves. We are struck with wonder at 
any manifestation of half-reasoning sagacity or inherited 
instinctive ingenuity in the dog, the horse, the elephant, 
or the ape, because we judge of it from the standard 



THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION 



of an irrational brute. But the infant, even of the 
savage, ere it has completed its third year, does daily 
and hourly, without attracting notice, what surpasses 
every marvel of the ' half-reasoning ' elephant or dog. 
In truth, the difference between the Australian savage 
and a Shakespeare or a Newton is trifling, compared 
with the unbridged gulf which separates him from the 
very wisest of dogs or apes. 

So far then it Would seem, that not one but many 
links are missing between man and his nearest anthro- 
poid fellow-creature. Moreover, the deduction is by no 
means settled beyond all question which assumes the 
Australian Bushman, or other savage, as the lowest, and 
therefore the earliest existing type in an ascending 
scale of humanity ; still less is it an indisputable 
assumption that they furnish in any sense illustra- 
tions of man in a state of nature. The gorilla or 
other wild animal in his native arboreal retreat is 
thoroughly natural and at home. He is there the 
perfect gorilla. His long, black, glossy fur is in 
beautiful condition. His whole physical state is one 
of cleanly, healthful consistency with all the natural 
functions of his being. He is incapable of moral 
wrong ; and in every relationship that binds him to 
his species he fulfils the duties of life unerringly. 
' Our early semi-human progenitors,' says Darwin, ' would 
not have practised infanticide, for the instincts of the 
lower animals are never so perverted as to lead them 
regularly to destroy their own offspring.' Are we not 
then guilty of gross injustice when we speak of the 
savage as brutish ? His is a degraded and abject 
humanity the farthest removed from the brutes. 
Man is most like the healthy well-conditioned wild 
animal, when seen in a state of civilisation : well- 



THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION. 



housed, cleanly, and in all virtuous obedience to the 
laws of nature, alike personally and in every social 
relation. It is not more reasonable to speak of those 
savages of civilisation, the city Arab or Bohemian, as 
in a state of nature, than of the filthy, unnaturally 
licentious, morally abject savage. If that is the state 
of nature for the brute in which it is found perfect in 
form, in fur, or plumage, fulfilling the ends of life in 
healthful accordance with every natural instinct, then 
savage man, regarded as an animal, is in no such state. 
On the contrary, he exhibits just such an abnormal 
deterioration from his true condition as is consistent 
with the perverted free-will of the rational free agent 
that he is. He is controlled by motives and impulses 
radically diverse from any brute instinct. This very 
capacity for moral degradation is one of the distinc- 
tions which separate man, by a no less impassable 
barrier than his latent aptitude for highest intellectual 
development, from all other living creatures. ' A 
beast, that wants discourse of reason,' is Shakespeare's 
idea of the inferior animal, when in his ' Hamlet ' he would 
contrast it with the unnatural conduct of rational man. 

If this view of the perfectly developed brute in a 
state of nature, and of man in conditions which seem 
no less natural to him as a being so diversely endowed, 
be correct, then we start with a fallacy when we com- 
pare degraded man with the matured lower animal. 
The points of seeming resemblance have no relation as 
links of a common descent. On the contrary, they 
have converged from opposite directions, and deceive 
us : just as the idiot, who is unquestionably a product of 
degradation, might be mistaken for the manward stage 
of progression of the ape. We have first to determine 
what is the nature of man before we can say what is 



THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION, 



a state of nature for him. But is it not an assumption 
of the major premiss to assert that he is but a deve- 
loped brute, and therefore that which is a state of 
nature for the one must be so for the other ? 

On any theory of evolution which assumes the savage 
to be the lowest surviving type of man as a link in the 
progressive stages of development of the brute into a 
rational being, the first manifestations of reason, while 
they blunt the pure instincts, would seem to result in a 
perverted moral sense, antagonistic to all the healthful 
instincts of its nature. Instinct is a safe guide to the 
brute, reason supplants it to the advantage of man ; but 
how to conceive of a survival of the fittest among those 
'semi-human progenitors' in the hybrid condition, with 
passions emancipated from the restraint of half-obliterated 
instincts, and uncontrolled by the glimmering reason, is 
the difficult problem of the new science. We must look 
elsewhere than in the kraal or lair of the Australian or 
Borneo savage, if we would forge anew the missing link 
between man and his nearest fellow-creatures : that 
intermediate brute-man which, on any theory of evolu- 
tion, must have actually existed in some early stage of 
the world. We have to conceive, if we can, of a being 
superior to the very wisest of our simian fellow-creatures 
in every reasoning power short of rationality ; but in- 
ferior to the most anthropoid ape in all those natural 
provisions for covering, defence, and subsistence, which 
are the substitutes for that reasoning foresight and 
inherited knowledge on which the naked defenceless 
savage relies. Why, on any theory of survival of the 
fittest, of natural, or of sexual selection, we should find 
the Fuegian or the Esquimaux naked descendants of 
progenitors naturally clothed with fur, becomes all the 
more incomprehensible if any significance is to be 



THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION. 



attached to the observation of Agassiz, that the boun- 
daries of distinct species and genera of mammals on the 
earth's surface coincide with the natural range of distinct 
types of man. If so, we should expect to find arctic man 
not less amply provided than the polar bear with a 
natural covering so indispensable to his native habitat. 

But, though the difficulty here suggested is one 
which must have occurred to many minds, it is not 
the half-human form of man's brute progenitor that 
puzzles the imagination. Fancy has long familiarised 
itself with sylvan fauns and satyrs, as with centaurs, 
mermaids, werwolves, and the like intermediate beings. 
It is the half-human intellect which is most difficult 
to realise : not the dormant reasoning faculties of 
the savage, but the undeveloped or partially developed 
rationality of a being that has ceased to be a brute, 
but has yet to become a man. Mr. Darwin, with 
that candour which has won for him the confidence of 
many a reluctant student, remarks that the difference of 
man in respect to his mental power, from all other animals 
' is enormous, even if we compare the mind of one of the 
lowest savages, who has no words to express any number 
higher than four, and who uses no abstract terms for the 
commonest objects or affections, with that of the most 
highly organised ape. The difference would, no doubt, 
still remain immense, even if one of the higher apes had 
been improved or civilised as much as a dog has been in 
comparison with its parent form, the wolf or jackal. 
The Fuegians rank among the lowest barbarians ; but I 
was continually struck with surprise how closely the 
three natives on board of H.M.S. " Beagle," who had 
lived some years in England, and could talk a little 
English, resembled us in disposition, and in most of our 
mental faculties.' The same idea impressed myself 



THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION. 



when camping out on the north shore of Lake Superior 
with Red Indian guides, who had come from beyond the 
Saskatchewan to trade their furs. The mental faculties 
of the Red Indian savage are dormant, not absent. He 
manifests, after some brief intercourse, a wonderful apti- 
tude for conforming in many ways to his civilised asso- 
ciates ; and much of the silent impassive stoicism of the 
Indian disappears, — turns out, indeed, to be no ethnical 
characteristic or native instinct, but an acquired habit. 
He is, in truth, as inquisitive as a child. 

Starting, then, from the assumed brute-progenitor of 
man,' we are to suppose, it may be presumed, that the 
brain went on growing, and with it the various mental 
faculties forming, until the transitional being acquired 
craft enough to outmatch all the mere physical force or 
instinctive wiles of its inferior fellow-creatures. But 
simultaneously with this approximation to man in 
cerebral development, we are also to assume that the 
huge jaws and great canine teeth became reduced in 
size, and all other brute-like attributes and powers de- 
clined. The arboreal haunts of the frugivorous or car- 
nivorous anthropoid were forsaken. The prehensile 
powers of the foot were exchanged for the firmer tread 
by means of which the weighty brain-mass is thence- 
forth to rest on the summit of the upright spinal column. 
He has learned to walk erect. His hands are thence- 
forth free for all ingenious and artistic manipulation 
which the growing brain may suggest ; but with increas- 
ing delicacy of action and sense of touch, they lose in a 
corresponding degree an excess of mere muscular power. 
Reason is to be of more account than physical force. 
Nor is it to be assumed that the evolution is even now 
complete, or that man has attained to finality as such; 
and so may hold himself ready for that next stage, or 
D 



THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION. 



fifth order of existence, which, according to the author 
of the ' Religio Medici,' is to make him superhuman : 
a creature not of the world, but of the universe. Evolu- 
tion is progressive as ever, though it moves in a new 
direction. The brain is now to be brought into ever- 
increasing activity, with corresponding developments, 
until Shakespeares and Newtons shall be, not the ex- 
ceptions, but the rule. This evolutionary being has 
thus, in a distant future, still higher destinies awaiting 
him, as the summit of the organic scale ; yet he is to 
bear to the last in his bodily frame the indelible stamp 
of his lowly origin. 

But in this process of exchanging native instincts and 
weapons, strength of muscle and natural clothing, for 
the compensating intellect, the transmuted brute must 
have reached a stage in which it was inferior in intellect 
to the very lowest existing savages, and in brute force 
to the lower animals. This is the being most difficult to 
realise, or to find an Eden for him, where, under any 
favouring circumstances, he could survive the latest 
stages of his marvellous transformation. That gulf 
bridged over by the sheltering aid of some mild insulated 
region and every favouring circumstance for the matur- 
ing and survival of a being dependent on such novel 
conditions, we have man's progenitor fairly started on 
his anthropomorphous course. With progressive cerebral 
growth, and a corresponding development of mental 
activity, a brain-power results capable of carrying on 
continuous trains of thought, and so tracing results to 
their causes. Hence experience, selfish caution, pruden- 
tial motives, sympathetic feelings : until at length there 
results the moral sense, a recognition of the distinction 
between right and wrong, a possibility of conceiving of 
moral responsibility, and so of God. The brute has 
become man. 



THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION. 33 

To realise for ourselves this strangely-evolved being, 
we have to think of something with greatly more of the 
healthy natural instincts of animal life than pertain to 
the degraded savage. Nevertheless the supreme difficul- 
ties lie in the earlier stages, which, on this hypothesis, 
are already past. Nature could now proceed freely with 
that last stage, in which the transformed brute dispensed 
with any remaining traces of natural clothing, nails or 
claws, teeth, and other offensive or defensive weapons : 
and so leave him to the novel resources, by means of 
which he is to become the tool-making, fire-using, cook- 
ing, clothing animal ; to make for himself houses, boats, 
implements, weapons ; to wander abroad with new ca- 
pacities for adapting himself to all climates ; until, from 
being the most helpless and limited in range of the 
higher animals, he assumes his rightful dominion over 
all : the one cosmopolitan to whom every living thing is 
subject. 

Had such an hypothesis of evolution been entertained 
in the sixteenth or the seventeenth century, it would 
have been vain to presume that the being, transitional 
alike in form and mind, which it presupposes, might not 
then exist in some unexplored region of the world. 
Now, however, such an idea cannot be entertained. On 
the contrary the advocates of the theory acknowledge 
the existence of an enormous and in'deed ever-widening 
break in the organic chain between man and his nearest 
allies, which cannot be relinked by any living or extinct 
species. 

The most brutish of human savages holds out no 
acknowledgment of near affinity to the most anthropoid 
of apes ; and imagination is left to work its will in 
realising the intermediate being, midway between the 
two., in which the brute came to an end and man began. 
D 2 



36 THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION. 

. To the evolutionist, the whole process by which such a 
change is assumed to have resulted seems so easy that 
he slights, if he does not wholly pass over, this final 
transitional stage, unconscious of the difficulties pressing 
on minds not less earnestly awakened to the reception 
of novel truths. To the inquirer who still acknowledges 
a natural repugnance to the acceptance of a law of 
progress which makes man no more than a highly de- 
veloped ape, it is difficult to give the imagination fair 
play in whatever share it should take in the solution 
of the problem. Yet imagination has its legitimate 
work to perform. In the grand discoveries of science, 
the conceiving imagination, which 'darts the soul into 
the dawning plan,' and realises beforehand what is to be 
proved by severest induction, plays a part no less im- 
portant than in the work of the poet. But happily at 
this stage we are enabled to summon to our aid the most 
original and creative fancy to realise for us the large- 
brained, half-reasoning brute, with some capacity for 
continuous thought and the accumulations of experience, 
but as yet devoid of moral sense, and so actuated solely 
by animal cravings and passions. 

Such a creature, it is admitted by the evolutionist, 
required very peculiar and exceptional circumstances to 
allow of its perpetuation. On any theory of the survival 
of the fittest it is difficult to deal with a being inferior 
in intellect, and probably in social disposition, to the 
lowest existing savages ; and at the same time inferior in 
brute-like powers, in the offensive or defensive weapons 
of nature, in the prehensile aptitude for climbing trees, 
in natural clothing, in all means of escape from danger 
or violence incident to its condition. But the peculiar 
circumstances which can alone give it the chance of sur- 
vival are hypothetically found for it in an imaginary 



THE CALIBAX OF EVOLUTION. 



island of the cainozoic world, warm and genial in climate, 
furnished with abundance of suitable food, and free from 
all special dangers. If Plato may have freest scope with 
his Atlantis, More with his Utopia, and Swift with his 
Laputa, it would be hard to stint our modern philoso- 
phers in the furnishing of their more ancient island with 
all needful requisites for a commonwealth on which the 
very existence of every subsequent one is believed by 
them to depend. 

The genial protection of an island-home may well 
suggest itself to the race which owes so much to the 
protective insulation of Britain. In far-off palaeolithic 
ages, when its manufacturing energies were exhausted 
on the flint and bone implements of the Drift-Folk, it 
was a bit of the neighbouring continent, and had its 
troubles accordingly, with cave-tigers, cave-bears, and 
other devouring monsters, such as must have been 
wholly unknown to that happy island-home of the 
ape-progenitor of man, when in his latest evolutionary 
stage. Britain was made and unmade, so far as its 
insular autonomy is concerned, during the post-Pliocene 
period. It had been reunited to the continent, after 
a lengthened period of insulation, when man coexisted 
with the mammoth, and the Thames is believed to have 
been a tributary of the Rhine. But happily its tribu- 
tary eras lie far off and obscure ; *and through all its 
latest and best stages of ethnical and historical evolu- 
tion its occupants may well 

' Thank Him who isled us here, and roughly set 
His Saxon in blown seas and storming showers.' 

Here, in one of England's pleasantest vales, in the year 
1564, and in an age in which the moral and intellectual 
energies of the human race were manifesting themselves 
with peculiar force throughout the civilised world, 



38 THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION. 

Shakespeare was born ; and he, before the close of his 
too brief career, dealt with the very conception which 
now seems so difficult to realise, and, untrammelled 
alike by Darwinian theories or anti-Darwinian pre- 
judices, gave the 'airy nothing a local habitation and 
a name.' 



CHAPTER III. 



CALIBAN'S ISLAND. 



'Antonio. What impossible matter will he make easy next? 

Sebastian. I think he will carry this island home in his pocket, and 
give it his son for an apple. 

Antonio. And sowing the kernels of it in the sea, bring forth more 
islands.' — The Tempest. 

THE idea of an island-world lying in some unex- 
plored ocean, beyond the influences that affect 
humanity at large, with its native beings, institutions, its 
civilisation, and a history of its own, has been the dream 
of very diverse ages, and the fancy of very dissimilar 
minds. It seems far from improbable, that in early 
unrecorded centuries, when, nevertheless, voyagers of 
the Mediterranean claimed to have circumnavigated the 
coasts of Africa, the world beyond the western ocean 
was not unknown to them. Vague intimations, derived 
seemingly from Egypt, encouraged the belief in a sub- 
merged island or continent, once the seat of arts and 
learning, far on the Atlantic main. The most definite 
narrative of this lost continent is that recorded in the 
' Timseus ' of Plato, on the authority of an older account 
which Solon is affirmed to have received from an Egyp- 
tian priest. The narrative is not without an air of 
truthfulness, when read in the light of modern geogra- 
phical and geological disclosures. The priest of the 
Nile claims for the temple-records of Egypt a vast 
antiquity, and tells the Athenian lawgiver that his 
people are mere children, their histories but nursery 
tales. In fables and vague traditions of the Greeks, 



CALIBAN'S ISLAND. 



faint memories had survived of deluges and convulsions 
by which the earth had been revolutionised in ages long 
prior to their historical records. In one of those the 
vast island of Atlantis— a continent larger than Lybia 
and Asia conjoined, — had been ingulfed in the ocean 
which bears its name. 

Whether the idea was a mere fancy of the first Egyp- 
tian narrator, or an allusion to transatlantic islands and 
continents with which communication had been held in 
some earlier age, it pleased the poets and philosophers 
of antiquity ; and frequent references occur in Greek and 
Roman authors to the lost Atlantis. But above all, this 
oceanic world of fancy or tradition has a special interest 
as the seat of Plato's imaginary commonwealth ; while it 
acquired a new significance when Columbus revealed 
what actually lay beyond that mysterious ocean in 
which the Hesperides and other mythological islands of 
antiquity had been placed by the poets. 

When the geologist in our own day proceeds to define 
the physical geography of Europe in that strange glacial 
period when the British Islands were conjoined to a 
continent which then existed in a condition analogous to 
the Arctic wastes of Greenland at the present time, he 
deals with revelations of science which outvie the legends 
of the old Nile, and restores a lost Atlantis to us, 
peopled with its extinct fauna, and on which man also 
appears, furnished with strange weapons and primeval 
arts. In the sober literalness of scientific induction, 
the chorographer far outrivals the fables of antique 
mythology, and undertakes to furnish, from well- 
accredited data, an ideal restoration of continents and 
islands as they existed when the Elephas Meridionalis, 
or huge pachyderm, older than the mammoth, roamed 
in their forests ; or of that island which was neither 



CALIBAN'S ISLAND. 



Ireland nor England, though it included much of both, 
over which the Mcgaceros, or gigantic deer of the Irish 
bogs, wandered at will ; and the human cave-dwellers of 
centuries undreamt of in historical chronology, played 
their unheeded part in the primeval dawn. Remoter, 
however, than that submerged and renewed island- 
world of prehistoric ages is the birthplace or scene of 
latest evolution of man's progenitor. It has to be 
located as yet with the Atlantis- of Plato and the 
Utopia of More, in some unexplored ocean of unimagin- 
ably remote eras. But who shall venture to say that 
it lies beyond the compass of science in the triumphs of 
the coming time ? 

Already the first steps have been indicated whereby 
the explorer is to pursue his way towards that undeter- 
mined birthplace of man, at that stage of the pedigree 
where our progenitors diverged from that selected 
catarhine division of the Simiadae, the determination 
of which robs the western world of all claim to the 
primeval Atlantis. The fact that the Simian progeni- 
tors of man belonged to this stock clearly shows, ac- 
cording to its demonstrator, that they inhabited the 
old world ; but, Mr. Darwin adds, ' not Australia, nor 
any oceanic island, as we may infer from the laws of 
geographical distribution. In each great region of the 
world the living mammals are closely related to the 
extinct species of the same region. It is therefore 
probable, that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct 
apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee ; and 
as these two species are now man's nearest allies, it is 
somewhat more probable that our early progenitors 
lived on the African continent than elsewhere.' When, 
however, Mr. Darwin is speculating on the immediate 
Simian ancestry of man, he reflects on the deficiency in 



CALIBAN'S ISLAND. 



the social element of the huge, powerful, ferocious 
gorilla: whereby the development of such peculiarly 
human qualities as sympathy, and the love of his 
fellow-creatures, would be impeded in an improved 
descendant ; and hence he conceives that it may have 
been no unimportant element in the ampler humanity 
of the final evolution, that man sprung rather from some 
comparatively small and weak species like the chim- 
panzee, but growing ultimately larger and stronger, 
even while losing such offensive and defensive appli- 
ances as pertained to his brute-original. The social 
element which leads man to give and receive aid, when 
combined with his tool -making aptitude, more than 
counterbalances any inferiority in strength to the wild 
beasts he may have to encounter. The puny Bushman 
of Africa holds his ground against the fiercest animals 
of that continent, and the stunted Esquimaux is equally 
successful in resisting alike the physical hardships and 
the ravenous monsters of arctic snows. Still Mr. 
Darwin recognises the peculiar dangers incident to that 
last semi-human transitional stage. 'The early pro- 
genitors of man,' he remarks, 'were, no doubt, inferior 
in intellect, and probably in social disposition, to the 
lowest existing savages ; but it is quite conceivable that 
they might have existed, or even flourished, if while 
they gradually lost their brute-like powers, such as 
climbing trees, &c, they at the same time advanced in 
intellect. But granting that the progenitors of man 
were far more helpless and defenceless than any exist- 
ing savages, if they had inhabited some warm continent, 
or large island, such as Australia, or New Guinea, or 
Borneo, they would not have been exposed to any 
special danger.' 

So says Mr. Darwin, when in search of an earthly 



CALIBAN'S ISLAND. 



paradise for the brute-progenitor of man. In such an 
imagined island, with all other conditions favouring, he 
sees no further impediment to the final elevation of 
this transitional being to a perfected humanity, 'through 
the survival of the fittest, combined with the inherited 
effects of habit.' But such a process, under the most 
favourable conditions, must be conceived of as one 
multiplied through countless generations, during which 
that irrational animal rose by imperceptible degrees 
into the novel condition of a rational intelligent being. 

Though Borneo — still tenanted by the orang, — is 
selected by Mr. Darwin as an island presenting many 
such requirements as the early progenitors of man 
stood in need of, its area is insufficient for some of the 
necessities of a being so widely diffused within the 
remotest ascertainable period of his existence. He 
points rather to an insular Africa as the seat of the 
catarhine Eden, where the final step in anthropomor- 
phic evolution was effected ; yet in this he owns that 
speculation is striving after what probably lies beyond 
its reach. The continents of that imagined era, what- 
ever their fauna may have included, lie for the most 
part among ■ the ruins of an elder geological world, 
submerged it may be by oceans that have long since 
upheaved their beds into new land ; and the data by 
means of which the obliterated map may be retraced, 
have yet to be sought for in their buried strata. But 
in the map of that other world of fancy over which 
the genius of Shakespeare reigns supreme, an island 
may still be found, such as the speculator on man's 
evolution and long descent craves for his last transi- 
tional stage. There the dramatist, for purposes of his 
own, has anticipated the enormous lapse of time need- 
ful for evolving intellect out of such irrational germs,' 



CALIBAN'S ISLAND. 



by bringing the rude, speechless, 'freckled whelp,' 
with its brute-like powers and instincts, into direct 
contact with intellect in its very highest activity. 
Humanity is represented as endowed with extraor- 
dinary, or even what may for our present purpose be 
styled miraculous powers ; and so the transmutation, 
for which under any conceivable normal process its 
originators would deem centuries inadequate, is ex- 
hibited as it were under a forcing process, whereby we 
can study some of its most important gradations as 
they presented themselves to the most original and 
objective mind. 

The sixteenth century, to which this latter evolu- 
tionist belongs, was an age of earnest faith, nor alto- 
gether devoid of credulity. To the men of Shakespeare's 
day, the strange approximations to humanity which 
we are now called on, in reliance upon severest scien- 
tific induction, to realise for ourselves, by no means 
seemed so improbable as they now do. The new 
worlds of which Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, the 
apocryphal Raphael Hythloday, Gomara, Lane, Harriott 
and Raleigh wrote, seemed more fitly occupied by 
Calibans than any ordinary type of humanity. The 
grotesque tales of monsters, giants, and the like super- 
natural extravagances, with which Mandeville and 
other early travellers garnished their narratives, were 
suited to the expectations, no less than to the taste 
of much more enlightened ages than theirs. The most 
incredible news that a Columbus or a Raleigh could 
have brought back from the New World, would have 
been the reported existence of men and women, in 
person, customs, arts, and all else, exactly like them- 
selves. It was in all honesty that Othello entertained 
Desdemona with the story of his life, — 



CALIBAN'S ISLAND. 



' Of moving accidents by flood and field, 
And of the cannibals that each other eat, 
The anthropophagi, and men whose heads 
Do grow beneath their shoulders.' 

And in like ingenuous simplicity to hear this ' would 
Desdemona seriously incline ; ' for Shakespeare had the 
very best authority for such quaint anthropophagi. In 
his account of Guiana, Raleigh tells of a nation of 
people on the Caoro ' whose heads appear not above 
their shoulders, which, though it may be thought a 
mere fable, yet,' says the astute Raleigh, ' I am re- 
solved it is true, because every child in the provinces 
of Arromaia and Canuri affirms the same. They are 
called Ewaipanoma ; they are reported to have their 
eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle 
of their breasts.' Though all the exertions of Raleigh 
to get sight of those marvellous Ewaipanoma, the true 
type of antipodes, proved vain, yet he evidently 
credited the story. He reverts to it anew in another 
place, as a thing in which he fully believed ; and when 
enumerating the various tribes by which the region is 
occupied, he states, as though it were a fact no less 
thoroughly authenticated than all else he has to write 
about, ' To the west of Caroli are divers nations of 
cannibals, and of those Ewaipanoma without heads.' 

Mr. Joseph Hunter fancies Prospero's enchanted 
island to have been in the Mediterranean ; and indeed 
the foremost point to be established by his ' Disquisi- 
tion on Shakespeare's Tempest ' is that the island of 
Lampedusa, lying midway between Malta and the 
African coast, is the veritable Prospero's island. ' It 
is precisely in the situation which the circumstances 
of every part of the story require. Sailors from 
Algiers land Sycorax on its shores ; Prospero, sailing 
from an Italian port, and beating about at the mercy 



46 CALIBAN'S ISLAND. 

of the waves, is found at last with his lovely charge, 
at Lampedusa ; Alonzo, sailing from Tunis, and steer- 
ing his course for Naples, is driven by a storm a little 
out of his track, and lights on Lampedusa.' So writes 
Mr. Hunter, with even less doubt about his enchanted 
island than Sir Walter Raleigh entertained regarding 
the headless Ewaipanoma on the Caoro river of ' the 
beautiful empire of Guiana.' It only remains to trace 
out Ariel's course to the same island, and then all its 
occupants will be accounted for. Nor is this wholly 
neglected, for Mr. Hunter gravely notes that ' Lam- 
pedusa is in seas where the beautiful phenomenon is 
often seen, called by sailors the Querpo Santo, or the 
Fires of Saint Helmo. The commentators have told 
us that these fires are the fires of Ariel. But the 
very name of the island itself, Lampedusa, may seem 
to be derived, as Fazellus says it is, from flames such 
as Ariel's.' The island measures in circuit thirteen 
miles and a half, is situated in a stormy sea, abounds 
with troglodytic caves, and ' writers worthy of confi- 
dence assert that no one can reside in it, on account 
of the phantasms, spectres, and horrible visions that 
appear in the night : repose and quiet being banished 
by the formidable apparitions and frightful dreams 
that fatally afflict with deathlike terrors whoever does 
remain there so much as one night.' Were it worth 
while marshalling evidence to refute all this, the 
first witness to be summoned is Caliban himself, who 
gives it all the flattest contradiction so far as his 
island is concerned. ' Come, swear to that ; kiss the 
book,' says Stephano, when he tells him that his mis- 
tress, the old witch Sycorax, had shown him the man 
in the moon, with his dog and brush. But he tells 
him without prompting, that — 



CALIBAN'S ISLAND. 



' The isle is full of noises, 
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not;' 

and so far from night being made horrible by fright- 
ful apparitions, the poor monster found his dreams so 
delightful that when he waked he cried to dream 
again. Ferdinand, again, might very properly be 
called on to explain how it was that, if Lampedusa, a 
Mediterranean island, within easy sail of the neigh- 
bouring Italian coast, was the actual Prospero's isle, 
it should have struck him as so marvellous a thing to 
meet a maiden there whose speech was Italian, that 
he exclaims in utter astonishment, ' My language ! 
heavens ! ' Mr. Hunter does indeed proceed with 
other coincidences, to him absolutely extraordinary. 
There is on Lampedusa an actual hermit's cell, and 
' this cell is surely the origin of the cell of Prospero.' 
Again, ' there is a coincidence which would be very 
extraordinary if it were merely accidental, between 
the chief occupation of Caliban and the labour im- 
posed upon Ferdinand, on the one hand, and some- 
thing which we find belonging to Lampedusa on the 
other. Caliban's employment is collecting firewood. 
It may be but for the use of Prospero. But Ferdinand 
is employed in piling up thousands of logs of wood/ 
It only requires, in order to complete the coincidence, 
to assume that Duke Prospero drove -a brisk trade in 
firewood with the Algerine and other sailors ; for he 
could not possibly want all this huge pile for him- 
self. In reality the task of piling logs, to which 
Ferdinand is compelled by ' Prospero, as a test of 
his devotion to Miranda, is just the very work 
of which the English adventurers who accompanied 
Captain Smith to Virginia, are found making in- 
dignant complaint, and adds one more indication to 



48 CALIBAN'S ISLAND. 

point us beyond the Atlantic in search of the magic 
isle. 

Chalmers and Malone have concurred in asserting, 
that the title of the play, as well as the circumstances 
of its opening scene, were suggested by a dreadful hurri- 
cane which dispersed the fleet of Sir George Somers, in 
July, 1609, when on the way to the infant colony of 
Virginia with a large supply of men and provisions. 
The ship, called ' The Admiral,' with Sir George Somers 
and Sir Thomas Gates on board, was separated from 
the rest of the fleet, and wrecked on the island of 
Bermuda. Of this an account was published by Jourdan 
the following year, entitled ' A Discovery of the Ber- 
mudas, otherwise called the Isle of Devils ;' and it 
is by no means improbable that from this pamphlet 
Shakespeare derived the first hint of the incidents on 
which the plot of 'The Tempest' is constructed. But as 
Ariel is despatched for dew to ' the still-vexed Ber- 
moothes,' that at least is not the scene of Prospero's 
enchantments ; nor was it in any degree requisite that 
the dramatist should give precise longitude and latitude 
to the ' uninhabited island,' where the scenes of his 
' Tempest ' are laid. The poets had in various ways 
an interest in the strange worlds that were then being 
revealed beyond the Atlantic. Spenser had as his 
special friend and wise critic, Sir Walter Raleigh, ' The 
Shepheard of the Ocean,' who ' said he came far from 
the main-sea deep.' Sir Philip Sidney's correspondence 
is replete with evidence of the interest he took in the 
voyages of Gilbert, Frobisher, and others, 'for the 
finding of a passage to Cathaya ; ' and to him is dedi- 
cated the first publication of Hakluyt, 'touching the 
discoveries of America and the islands adjacent unto 
the same.' The Earl of Southampton, the noble 



CALIBAN'S ISLAND. 



godfather to Shakespeare's ' Venus and Adonis,' the 
'first heir of his invention,' was an active co-operator in 
the Virginia Company. Ralph Lane, whose letters, 
written on the island of Roanoke in 1585, have an in- 
terest as the oldest extant English writings from the 
New World, sailed under Raleigh's patronage ; and 
Thomas Harriott, who was in his family, not only pur- 
sued on the same island the algebraic experiments to 
which the solution of equations was due, but carried out 
some of those astronomical observations which, among 
other distinctions, now mark him for special note as the 
first observer of the spots on the sun. Have we not, 
in this Thomas Harriott — discoverer of the complele 
system of modern algebra, rival of Galileo in the first 
observations on the satellites of Jupiter, author of the 
' Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of 
Virginia, ' and reputed bearer of the gift of ' divine 
tobacco ' to the English nation, — the true type of 
Prospero, who, with the aid of his magical books and 
his potent wand, could boast that he had bedimmed 
the noontide sun ? 

That Shakespeare had in view the strange new lands 
of the western ocean we can discern very clearly ; for 
Gonzalo comforts his companions in their affright at some 
of the monstrous ' people of the island' very much in 
Raleigh's own words : 

' Faith, sir, you need not fear. When we were boys, 
Who would believe that there were mountaineers 
Dew-lapp'd like bulls, whose throats had hanging at 'em 
Wallets of flesh? or that there were such men 
Whose heads stood in their breasts ? which now we find 
Each putter-out of five for one will bring us 
Good warrant of.' 

The 'putters-out of five for one' were the merchant 

adventurers, who risked their money, and not unfre- 

E 



CALIBAN'S ISLAND. 



quently their lives, in the search for new worlds, and 
came back laden with travellers' tales, if with no other 
riches. 

It is vain to search on the map for Prospero's island. 
Malone and Chalmers, indeed, entertained no doubt 
that Shakespeare had Bermuda in view. Mr. Joseph 
Hunter, among other notices of Shakespeare's own 
time, quotes a curious account, from ' The Silver Watch 
Bell ' of Thomas Tymme, of the Bermudas, or Isle of 
Devils, where ' to such as approach near the same, there 
do not only appear fearful sights of devils and evil 
spirits, but also mighty tempests with most terrible and 
continual thunder and lightning, and the noise of 
horrible cries, with screeching,' &c, which are reported 
to make all glad to fly with utmost speed from the 
horrible place. This is supposed to have suggested to 
Shakespeare the scene of his opening tempest, and the 
island whereon Sycorax preceded his enchantments 
with her terrible sorceries. Moore, in his ' Epistle from 
the Bermudas,' accordingly says, ' We cannot forget that 
it is the scene of Shakespeare's Tempest ; and that here 
he conjured up the delicate Ariel, who alone is worth 
the whole heaven of ancient mythology.' Mr. Hunter 
has felt it incumbent on him to enter on a course of 
very elaborate argument to overthrow these Bermudan 
claims, before his own grand Lampedusan discovery 
could have any chance of popular favour. But the 
whole argument was very needless. Wherever Pros- 
pero's isle may have been, the poet was careful to tell 
us that it was not Bermuda ; otherwise how could Ariel 
have been called up at midnight to do his master's 
errand, and 'fetch dew from the still-vexed Bermoothes'? 
In truth, the island belongs to the poet's sole domain ; 
and having done its work in the realm of fancy, we may 



CALIBAN'S ISLAND. 



be content to leave it till modern science rediscover it and 
its true lord, the missing Caliban of fancy or of fact. 
Otherwise ' deeper than did ever plummet sound,' it lies 
with Prospero's magic books. 

From Milan the banished duke and his infant daughter 
were indeed borne only some leagues to sea, before they 
were abandoned in 

' A rotten carcass of a boat, not rigg'd, 
Nor tackle, sail, nor mast : the very rats 
Instinctively had quit it.' 

But then the noble Gonzalo had not only furnished 
his old master with rich garments and provisions of all 
sorts, but out of the ducal library had culled the 
precious volumes of science and of magic which he 
prized above his dukedom ; and so, with these and his 
wizard staff, he was as well provisioned for an ocean 
voyage as the witch in ' Macbeth,' when she set sail for 
Aleppo in a sieve : able no less to dispense with helm 
or oar than ' a rat without a tail.' When the scene 
opens with the tempest, which gives name to this 
charming drama, we learn indeed that the rest of the 
fleet which had escorted the usurping duke in his 
unpropitious voyage, after being storm-tossed and dis- 
persed by Ariel's wiles, 

'All have met again, 
And are upon the Mediterranean flote, 
Bound sadly home for Naples.' 

But the ocean tides rise and fall upon the yellow sands 
of Prospero's island as they never did to Virgil's sea- 
nymphs ; and when he would 

' Betwixt the green sea and the azur'd vault 
Set roaring war,' 

E 2 



CALIBAN'S ISLAND. 



he can call at will, not only the 

' Elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves ; 
But those that on the sands with printless feet 
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him 
When he comes back.' 

Prospero is, indeed, full of the idea of the tide's ebb and 
flow, as if to remove his enchanted island beyond all 
question into regions remotest from Mediterranean 
tideless shores. When, at the last, he has all charmed 
within his enchanted circle, he exclaims, in mingled 
metaphor and allusion — 

' Their understanding 
Begins to swell ; and the approaching tide 
Will shortly fill the reasonable shore 
That now lies foul and muddy.' 

There is one anciently described island of the New 
World, very familiar to the men of Shakespeare's day, 
and which it is obvious enough that the poet himself had 
in view, when he lets the gentle Gonzalo picture to us 
what would be, had he the plantation of this new-found 
isle. He is fresh from the study of Montaigne's philo- 
sophy ; and as to the island-scene of his communistic 
idealism, it is the veritable Utopia of which Sir Thomas 
More had already learned so much from the Raphael 
Hythloday of his philosophic fiction. Gonzalo, we must 
remember, philosophises in playful banter, dealing in such 
wise fooling as may suit his fickle auditors : ' Gentlemen 
of brave mettle, who would lift the moon out of her sphere, 
if she would continue in it five weeks without changing!' 
It is thus he deals with the Platonic fiction : — 

' Gon. I' the commonwealth, I would by contraries 
Execute all things ; for no kind of traffic 
Would I admit ; no name of magistrate ; 
Letters should not be known : riches, poverty, 



CALIBAN'S ISLAXD. 



53 



And use of service, none; contract, succession, 

Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none : 

No use of metal, com, or wine, or oil : 

No occupation; all men idle, all; 

And women too ; but innocent and pure : 

No sovereignty; — 

Seb. Yet he would be king on 't. 

Ant. The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning. 

Gon. All things in common nature should produce 
Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony, 
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine, 
Would I not have ; but nature should bring forth, 
Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance, 
To feed my innocent people. 

Seb. No marrying 'mong his subjects? 

Ant. None, man ; all idle ; whores and knaves. 

Gon. I would with such perfection govern, sir, 
To excel the golden age. 

Seb. Save his majesty ! 

Ant. Long live Gonzalo ! 

Gon. And, — do you mark me, sir? 

A Ion. Prithee, no more: thou dost talk nothing to me. 

Gon. I do well believe your highness ; and did it to minister 
occasion to these gentlemen, who are of such sensible and nimble 
lungs that they always use to laugh at nothing.' 

But when we have identified Prospero's island with the 
Utopia of Hythloday, we are still far as ever from fixed 
longitudes and latitudes ; for it is but the ovtottos, the 
nowhere, of More's imaginary commonwealth : nowhere, 
yet nevertheless the discovery of a reputed fellow- 
voyager of Amerigo Vespucci. With this latter help to 
such geographical research, the mythology of the island 
agrees : for Setebos, the god of the witch Sycorax, is 
a Patagonian deity, mentioned by Richard Eden in his 
' History of Travayle in the West and East Indies, and 
other countreys lying eyther way towardes the fruitfull 
and ryche Moluccaes.' There it may be presumed 
Shakespeare picked up the name, and what else he 
needed for the ' uninhabited island' — uninhabited, that 
is, so far as human beings are concerned, before Pros- 



54 CALIBAN'S ISLAND. 

pero's arrival, — which he has peopled for us so well. 
There, as Ariel tells his master in the second act — 

'Safely in harbour 
Is the king's ship ; in the deep nook, where once 
Thou call'd'st me up at midnight to fetch dew 
From the still-vex'd Bermoothes.' 

The island, therefore, is not farther, at any rate, from 
the Bermudas, than from Naples or Milan ; and though 
the dispersed fleet is once more safely afloat on the 
Mediterranean, and — all but the king's ship, — already 
bound for Naples, before Prospero restores his Ariel to 
the elements, that tricksy spirit has one more duty to 
perform ; and so the Duke is able to promise to all 

' Calm seas, auspicious gales, 
And sail so expeditious, that shall catch 
The royal fleet far off,' 

and so be in Naples as soon as them. It is vain, then, 
to apply any ordinary reckoning to such voyagers' log, 
or to seek by longitude or latitude to fix the locality 
of Caliban's island-home : any more than to map out 
on a geographical chart of modern centuries that pre- 
historic Borneo, New Guinea, or other anthropomorphic 
Eden, where the half-brute progenitor of man, when in a 
state considerably in advance of the chimpanzee, orang, 
or gorilla, in all intellectual attributes, but far more help- 
less and defenceless than any existing savage, found 
those favouring conditions which admitted of the slow 
process of evolution resulting in Man. 



CHAPTER IV. 



THE TEMPEST. 



' Sebastian. A living drollery. Now I will believe 
That there are unicorns; that in Arabia 
There is one tree, the phcenix' throne; one phcenix 
At this hour reigning there.' — The Tempest. 

THE grave comedy which supplies to us Shakespeare's 
realisation of the half-human beings which in the 
sixteenth century were supposed to inhabit the new- 
found lands of the deep-sea main, is in other respects 
rich in some of the choicest imaginings of his genius. 
In ' The Tempest,' as in the lighter comedy of ' A Mid- 
summer Night's Dream,' his fancy revels in the embodi- 
ment of the supernatural creed of his own day. In both 
the homely and grotesque intermingle with the super- 
human elements of the drama with such seeming 
naturalness and simplicity, that it becomes no more im- 
probable than the marvels of night's wonderland appear 
to the dreamer. But it is with a graver purpose and 
more earnest meaning that Shakespeare has wrought the 
scenes of the later drama into such artful consistency ; 
and interwoven with the unsophisticated tenderness of 
Miranda's love, the philosophy of Gonzalo, and Duke 
Prospero's sage reflections on this fleeting shadow of 
mortality. 

The Caliban of 'The Tempest,' cannot be rightly 
estimated, unless viewed in the rich setting in which 
Shakespeare has placed his rude disproportioned shape. 
It is, as a whole, an assay piece of his art. He sports 



k6 THE TEMPEST. 



f 



there with its difficulties, as the Prospero of his own 
creation does with the spirits of the elements ; and 
seems to have set himself what shall task and prove the 
ample compass of his power. He endows Prospero with 
superhuman wisdom, and arms him with all the for- 
bidden mastery of the magician's art ; yet preserves to 
him the generous attributes of a noble nature, giving ab- 
solute power, where it is employed without abuse under 
the restraints of virtue. In Miranda he aims at realising 
what a pure guileless woman would become, trained 
from infancy apart from all intercourse with her own 
sex, nurtured in every refinement of intellectual culture, 
yet the inmate of a rude cell, ignorant of all the conven- 
tionalities which society breeds, and having never from 
infancy seen any human being but her own father. In 
her, accordingly, Shakespeare embodies all that is pure 
and lovely in true womanhood, apart from the conven- 
tional proprieties of artificial life ; and having thus made 

her 

' So perfect and so peerless ; one created 
Of every creature's best,' 

yet not perfected into aught that is superhuman, he 
places alongside of her two other beings begot by the 
same prolific fancy, the one above and the other below 
the rank of humanity. Of these the superhuman is an 
ethereal spirit, incapable of human passions, and only 
withheld from the elements, in which it longs to mingle, by 
the constraining power of Prospero's magical art ; the 
other is the rude, earth-born animal which so strikingly 
realises for .us the highest conceivable development of 
brute-nature. They stand alongside of each other, yet 
have nothing in common, hold no intercourse, exchange 
no words : the representative embodiments, as it were, of 
two incompatible elements brought into compulsory ap- 



THE TEMPEST. 



position by the mediate humanity of Prospero. The 
scenes in which such widely diverse characters enact 
their parts, constitute as a whole one of the most 
original, as it is one of the most beautiful, of all that 
special department of the Shakespearean drama in which 
the world of ideal fancy mingles without constraint with 
the realities of every-day life. 

In the list of characters, or ' Names of the Actors,' as 
it is styled, appended to the first edition of the play, 
Caliban is described as ' a salvage and deformed slave,' 
and has a rank assigned to him between the noble 
followers of the King of Naples and Trinculo the jester, 
Stephano, a drunken butler, and the rude sailors ; while 
Miranda intervenes between the latter and Ariel, 'an 
ayerie spirit,' with the other spirits who play their part 
as actors in the masque. 

In the folio of 1623, 'The Tempest' ranks foremost in 
place, and appeared there for the first time seven years 
after its author's death. The supposition that it is the 
very last of all the creations of his genius has already 
been referred to. It is a poet's fancy, and cannot now 
admit of proof. But the play is printed with so few im- 
perfections, that it may be assumed to have been derived 
directly from the author's manuscript. It may indeed 
have been this manuscript — then fresh from Shake- 
speare's pen, the final triumph of his magic art, — that 
his editors had specially in view, when in the preface to 
the collected edition of his dramas, they say, in loving 
remembrance of the genius of their deceased friend : 
' Who as he was a happy imitator of Nature, was a most 
gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together, 
and what he thought, he uttered with that easiness that 
.we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.' 

The last days of the poet had been pleasantly passed 



58 THE TEMPEST. 



in the haunts of his boyhood ; and among his pastimes 
it is not to be doubted had been the painsful pleasure of 
revising and completing some of his marvellous dramas, 
and preparing the whole for the press. To his brother 
actors and literary executors — ' my fellows,' as he styles 
them, — John Hemingeand Henry Condell, he bequeathed 
' twenty-six shillings and eightpence apiece, to buy them 
rings ; ' and to them were transferred the revised quartos 
and original MSS. which were the source of the famous 
1623 folio. ' We have scarce received from him a blot 
in his papers/ the admiring editors declare. It were to 
be wished that they had done their editorial work with 
like pains and care. And yet had they done so the 
world might not altogether have been the gainer. In 
that case, for example, Pope had never produced his 
superb critical edition of Shakespeare, in which he 
laboured so assiduously to constrain the Elizabethan 
poet's ' native wood-notes wild ' to a conformity with the 
artificial standards of that year of grace A.D. 1725 ; and 
then Theobald, ' poor piddling Tibbald,' would have had 
no cause to write his ' Shakespeare Restored : or, a 
Specimen of the Many Errors, as well committed as 
unamended, in Pope's edition of this Poet ;' and so the 
irascible little bard of Twickenham would have missed 
the chief incentive which begot his ' Dunciad,' with 
Theobald for its hero : — 

' Where hapless Shakespeare, yet of Tibbald sore, 
Wished he had blotted for himself before.' 

The process of evolution thus originating in the ' errors 
as well committed as unamended ' in the famous first 
folio, has gone on in prolific multiplication of blots and 
blotters, till Shakespearean commentaries and illustra- 
tive criticisms have grown into a library ample enough 



THE TEMPEST. 



to task the reading of a lifetime. But ' The Tempest ' is 
exceptional in the correctness of its text, as in much 
else ; though Dryden did league with D'Avenant to show 
how utterly a noble work of art could be desecrated in 
adapting it to the tastes of a mean age ; and Pope, in 
trimming it to those of an artificial one, resyllabled its 
heroic numbers, attuned to his own ear, if not counted 
on his fingers ; and made other alterations which neither 
the hero of the ' Dunciad ' nor any other sound critic 
could accept as improvements. 

To the refined reader of this exquisite comedy, the 
central charm unquestionably must be that rare concep- 
tion of purest womanly grace and instinctive delicacy, 
Miranda. Womanly we call her, though she is but 
fifteen, and as unsophisticated in her sweet simplicity as 
when 

' In the dark backward and abysm of time,' 

' not out three years old,' she, with her banished father, 
was hurried on board the leaky ' rotten carcass of a 
boat ' which bore them to their island solitude. When, 
at length, ' bountiful Fortune ' brought thither Prospero's 
enemies, and placed them at his mercy : the same fortune 
brought with these Ferdinand, the young heir to the 
crown of Naples, to own that, though full many a lady 
he had ' eyed with best regard,' and found in each some 
special virtue to distinguish her, never till now did he 
look on one that had not some defect. But the guileless 
Miranda has no such experiences to tell of; and when 
her father would restrain the too ready response of his 
daughter to this noble lover, it is thus he schools her : — 

* Thou think'st there is no more such shapes as he, 
Having seen but him and Caliban ; foolish wench ! 
To the most of men this is a Caliban, 
And they to him are angels.' 



THE TEMPEST. 



But she only replies — 

' My affections 
Are then most humble; I have no ambition 
To see a goodlier man.' 

She gives her whole heart, in utter unconsciousness of 
the prudent fears which trouble her father, lest ' too light 
winning make the prize light.' Her innocency is still as 
untutored as when the scarce three-years-old child parted 
with the last of those woman-tendants whose memory 
haunted her rather like a dream than an assurance of 
which memory gave any warrant. She tells her lover : 

' I do not know 
One of my sex; no woman's face remember, 
Save, from my glass, mine own : nor have I seen 
More that I may call men than you, good friend, 
And my dear father: how features are abroad, 
I am skilless of; but, by my modesty, 
The jewel in my dower, I would not wish 
Any companion in the world but you : 
Nor can imagination form a shape, 
Besides yourself, to like of.' 

And so this ' fair encounter of two most rare affections ' 
proceeds in ' plain and holy innocence' : the realisation 
of a child of nature, unrestrained by all mere conventional 
proprieties, but guided by the unerring instincts of 
native modesty and purity. 

The setting of this exquisite creation of Shakespeare's 
genius has been designed with rare art to display by 
contrast the peculiar graces of perfect womanhood. The 
refined, ethereal, dainty Ariel, most delicate of sprites, 
incapable of affections that can become tender, and yet, 
though 'but of air,' having a touch, a feeling of human 
affections, hovers around Miranda, fulfilling her father's 
commands, but otherwise no more familiar with her 
than the zephyrs which lift her hair and fan her cheek. 



, 



THE TEMPEST. 



He is a sylph-like, spiritual essence, suited for fancy's 
lightest behests ; a being born as it were of the sweet 
breeze and the butterfly, as incapable of human love as 
of human hate or sin. But while this embodiment of 
the zephyr floats airily about Miranda in her mortal 
loveliness, by the cunning art of the dramatist she is 
brought into more immediate contact with the other 
extreme. Caliban is her fellow-creature, in a way that 
Ariel could never be, and provokes comparisons such as 
the other in no way suggests. For his is the palpable 
grossness of a lower nature, a creature of earth, not 
unredeemed by its own fitting attributes nor untrue to 
itself, but altogether below the level of humanity. 

Of the estimate formed of this unique creation of 
genius by the men of Shakespeare's own day, we have 
very slight means of judging. But the evidence of an 
utter incapacity for appreciating his genius by the 
Restoration court and age is nowhere more manifest 
than in the impure vulgar buffoonery with which the 
greatest of the poets of that new era helped to travesty 
the wild and savage nature of Caliban. ' The Tem- 
pest ; or, The Enchanted Island,' takes its place among 
the collected works of John Dryden, though it might 
perhaps more fitly rank with the forgotten dramas, 
masques, and other productions of Davenant's pen. 
Referring to their joint labours in vulgarising and pol- 
luting Shakespeare's comedy, Dryden says : ' It was 
originally Shakespeare's, a poet for whom he had a 
particularly high veneration, and whom he taught me 
first to admire.' The mode adopted by teacher and 
pupil for giving expression to their admiring veneration 
is sufficiently equivocal. The play itself, as Dryden 
tells us, had formerly been acted with success in the 
Blackfriars ; and its aptness for scenic effect and showy 



62 THE TEMPEST. 



spectacle — far more, it is to be presumed, than any ap- 
preciation of its higher excellences, — tempted Fletcher, 
Suckling, D'Avenant, and Dryden himself, to tamper with 
its delicate refinement, and debase it by means of 
spurious adaptations to the taste of a corrupt age. As 
to Fletcher's ' Sea Voyage,' he has rather borrowed the 
idea than tampered with the text of Shakespeare's 
' Tempest ' ; and as the supernatural elements are 
wholly omitted, it need not detain us. ' The Desert 
Islands ' of Fletcher are the scene of a gyneocracy 
or commonwealth of women : a Utopian paradise, 
which ' yields not fawns, nor satyrs, or most lustful 
men ; ' and he only borrows remotely the one idea 
of women trained from infancy on a desert island, 
without knowledge of the other sex. The Clarinda of 
Fletcher is mainly his own creation, and scarcely pro- 
vokes the comparison with Shakespeare's Miranda which 
it is so little fitted to stand. But D'Avenant and Dryden 
deal with the latter even more coarsely than with 
Caliban, in their efforts to adapt the chaste elder drama 
to the lascivious revels of the Restoration court. 

Sir William D'Avenant, cavalier and poet-laureat, with 
whom Dryden was associated in the travesty of ' The 
Tempest,' was the son of an Oxford innkeeper, at whose 
hostle Shakespeare is said to have been a frequent guest. 
The cavalier poet-laureat had been balked in his pur- 
posed exploration of the new-found lands of the Western 
world, exchanging for this only too ample opportunities 
to yearn for the imaginary commonwealth in which 
Gonzalo and many another philosophic dreamer had 
purposed to excel the golden age. He was made 
prisoner by a man-of-war in the service of England's 
newly realised commonwealth, in 165 1, when on his 
way to Virginia, to plant a royalist colony there ; and 



THE TEMPEST 63 



so exchanged the cavalier Utopia he was in search of, 
for a long captivity in the Tower. But better days were 
in store for him. After the Restoration he became 
manager of the Duke of York's players, and did his 
best to indemnify the dramatic muse for recent Puritan 
restraints by every conceivable liberty that could be 
found in the opposite extreme of licence. In the pre- 
face to their joint labours, Dryden describes his fellow- 
worker as ' a man of quick and piercing imagination,' 
and ' of so quick a fancy that nothing was proposed to 
him on which he could not suddenly produce a thought 
extremely pleasant and surprising; and as his fancy was 
quick, so likewise were the products of it remote and new. 
He borrowed not of any other; and his imaginations 
were such as could not easily enter into any other man.' 
The commendations of his original and pregnant genius 
read strangely out of place appended to such a specimen 
of his art. His quick fancy and piercing imagination 
are there shown by superadding to Shakespeare's Cali- 
ban a twin-sister, Sycorax, of whom her brother tells 
Trinculo, she is ' beautiful and bright as the full moon. 
I left her clambering up a hollow oak, and plucking 
thence the dropping honeycombs.' As to this beauty, 
it is intended to be judged of by Caliban's own standard; 
for she no sooner appears than Trinculo' addresses her as 
' my dear blubber-lips !' But there is nothing to tempt us 
to linger on Dryden's ' enchanted island,' unless it be the 
marvel that within an interval so brief the taste of a whole 
nation should have become so depraved as to tolerate 
this gross caricature of an exquisite work of genius. 

The strange being which invites our notice as the 
native-born occupant of Shakespeare's nameless island, 
and forms the counterpart to Ariel in the dramatic 
setting by which Miranda is displayed with such 



64 THE TEMPEST. 



rare art, can only be properly estimated by the careful 
student. At a first glance the brutish Caliban appears 
to occupy a very subordinate place among the creations 
of Shakespeare; and, compared with the ethereal 
minister of Prospero's wizard spells, he is apt to be 
regarded as a mere passive agent in the byplay of the 
comedy. Placed, moreover, as he is, in direct contrast to 
Miranda, ' so perfect and so peerless,' the half-human 
monster appears all the more deformed. But, in 
Dryden's vulgar travesty, he becomes, with his mother's 
legacy of ' great roaring devils,' the actual ' hag's seed ' 
and ' born devil ' of Prospero's mere wrathful hyperbole ; 
and, worthless as this contemptible rifacciamento is in 
all other respects, it has perhaps the one merit of show- 
ing how far removed the original Caliban is from the 
vulgar twin-monsters of the Restoration stage. 

So far from being either superficial or repulsive, 
Caliban is a character which admits of the minutest 
study, and is wrought to the perfection of a consistent 
ideal not less harmoniously, and even beautifully, than 
Ariel himself. Both are supernatural beings, called into 
existence by the creative fancy of the poet ; but the 
grosser nature is the more original of the two : more 
thoroughly imaged forth without the aid of current 
fancies of elves, and sprites, and all the airy denizens 
of Fairyland, which made the Puck of Shakespeare 
homely to all, and his Ariel, exquisite as it is, conceiv- 
able enough. For Dryden truly says of the poet in 
the prologue to his remodelled ' Tempest,' that ' he 
wrote as people then believed ;' while Dryden himself 
unhappily stooped to write as people of his later day 
desired. But, if he was indeed first taught by Dave- 
nant to admire Shakespeare, it is the less wonder that 
he should so very partially appreciate the elementr. 



THE TEMPEST. 



of his wondrous originality. In the same prologue 
he says : — 

' So from old Shakespeare's honoured dust, this day 
Springs up and buds a new- reviving play: 
Shakespeare who, taught by none, did first impart 
To Fletcher wit, to labouring Jonson art ; 
He, monarch-like, gave those his subjects law, 
And is that Nature which they paint and draw.' 

But it is in a very peculiar and exceptional sense that 
we can appeal to Nature in testing such impersonations 
of contemporary belief as either Ariel or Caliban. They 
are creations conceived by the most original genius,- 
though fashioned in perfect harmony with the beliefs of 
his age. To this they owe their peculiar charm. In 
them, as in others of his rare imaginings, his supernatural 
seems so natural, that we only realise to how large an 
extent it is the work of his own fancy, when we test it 
by comparison with that of his most gifted contem- 
poraries. 

It is the triumph of the poet thus to mirror the 
thoughts of his age. He does not startle it with what 
is strange, but with what seems most familiar to it. Yet 
with all the seeming familiarity of those exquisite em- 
bodiments of popular belief, and their consistency with 
the folk-lore of the time, they are .as purely fancy- 
wrought as the visions that haunt unbidden the gay 
romance of dreams. They were Shakespeare's own 
creations, but they seemed so thoroughly to realise 
what already commanded universal credence, that the 
charmed onlooker regarded them as no more than the 
mirroring of his own vaguest fancies. The imaginative 
power thus displayed in giving corporeal seeming and a 
consistent individuality to such 'airy nothings' will be 
best appreciated by the reader who has already familiar- 
ised himself with the supernatural beings that figure in 
F 



66 THE TEMPEST. 



the verse of Marlow, Jonson, Fletcher, and even of 
Milton. They are no less Shakespeare's own creations 
than his Othello, or Hamlet, his Portia, Imogen, Ophelia, 
or Lady Macbeth. He wrought indeed with the current 
thought of his age, but of none of them can it be said, 
that he merely produces the portraiture of what was 
already familiar to it ; and least of all could this be 
affirmed of Caliban. He is in a peculiar sense a super- 
natural character, lying as much beyond the bounds of 
human experience as any fairy, ghost, or spirit of the 
creed of superstition, either in that age or our own : 
earth-born, and fashioned on the ideal of the brute, 
yet so distinct from anything hitherto seen or known 
on earth, that only now, two centuries and a half after 
its production on the English stage, has it entered into 
the mind of the scientific naturalist to conceive of such 
a being as possible. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE MONSTER CALIBAN. 

' Arise, and fly 
The reeling Faun, the sensual feast; 
Move upward, working out the beast, 
And let the ape and tiger die.' 

In Memoriam. 

THE innate and seemingly instinctive aptitude of 
the human mind to conceive of the supernatural 
is so universal, and so intimately interwoven with that 
other conception of a spiritual life, the successor of this 
present corporeal existence, — which, far more than any 
supposed belief in a Supreme Being, seems the universal 
attribute of man, — that Shakespeare's whole conception 
of the supernatural may fitly come under review as a 
sequel to the more limited subject specially occupying 
our consideration. But it is sufficient for the present 
to bear in mind the originality and prolific powers 
revealed in his supernatural imaginings, in order the 
more clearly to appreciate the one portraiture of a 
being which, though in no sense spiritual, is so far as 
all experience goes, thoroughly supra-natural. 

"Tis strange, my Theseus,' says Hippolyta to her 
ducal lover, as the fifth act of ' A Midsummer Night's 
Dream ' opens in a hall of his palace at Athens, 
where they hold discourse on the themes that lovers 
speak of. The previous scenes have been ripe with 
the sportive creations of the poet's fancy, with his 
Oberon, Titania, and all their fairy train ; and now, in 
F 2 



68 THE MONSTER CALIBAN. 

true dramatic fashion, he claims the shadowy be- 
ings as his own. ' More strange than true,' Theseus 
replies : — 

' I never may believe 
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. 
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, 
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend 
More than cool reason ever comprehends;' 

and then, after quaintly coupling the lover and the 
lunatic as beings 'of imagination all compact,' he adds 
this other picture of the poet's fantasies : — 

' The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, 
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; 
And as imagination bodies forth 
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing 
A local habitation and a name. 
Such tricks hath strong imagination.' 

As to the actual belief in the beings so dealt with, 
among the men of that generation, it was vague and 
indeterminate as themselves. When, indeed, the poet 
glanced to earth, and called up on the blasted heath, 
near by the scene of Macbeth's great victory over the 
Norweyan host, those wild and withered hags, that 
' looked not like the inhabitants o' the earth, and yet 
were on't,' he idealised a very harsh and deep-rooted 
belief of his age. When again he glanced from earth, 
not to heaven, but to that intermediate spirit-world, 
with all the ghostly or airy habitants with which fancy 
or superstition had favoured it, he wrought with ma- 
terials that had fashioned the creed of many generations. 
He had, himself, believed in fairies ; and doubtless still 
regarded ghosts with becoming awe. They had held 
mastery over his youthful imagination ; constituted the 



THE MONSTER CALIBAN. f, 9 

fancies and the terror of his childhood ; and were in 
his maturer years translated into those supernatural 
beings which have proved so substantial to other gene- 
rations. 

But the poet's own age had been familiarised with 
ideal beings of a wholly different kind, the reality of 
which seemed scarcely to admit of question. Of the 
new world of the West which Columbus had revealed, 
there was, at any rate, no room for doubt ; and yet 
when, nearly a century after its discovery, Spenser 
refers, in his ' Faerie Queen,' not only to the Indian 
Peru and the Amazon, but to that ' fruitfullest Virginia ' 
of which his friend Raleigh had told him many a won- 
drous tale, it is obvious that to his fancy America was 
still almost as much a world apart as if his ' Shepherd 
of the Ocean ' had sailed up the blue vault of heaven, and 
told of the dwellers in another planet on which it had 
been his fortune to alight. He is defending the veri- 
similitude of that Fairyland in which Una and the Red 
Cross Knight, Duessa, Belphcebe, Orgoglio, Malecastaes 
and so many more fanciful impersonations disport them- 
selves, with King Arthur and the Faerie Queen herself: 
and he argues that since Peru, Virginia, and all the 
wonders of that new-found hemisphere prove to be real, 
what marvel if this Fairyland of his fancy be no less 
substantial a verity. For even now, of the world the 
least part is known to us ; and daily through hardy 
enterprise new regions are discovered, as unheard-of as 
were the huge Amazon, the Indian Peru, or other strange 
lands now found true : — 



Yet all these were, when no man did them know, 
Yet have from wisest ages hidden been; 
And later times things more unknown shall show : 
Why then should witless man so much misween, 



THE MONSTER CALIBAN. 



That nothing is but that which he hath seen? 
What if, within the moon's fair shining sphere, 
What if, in every other star unseen 
Of other worlds he happily should hear? 
He wonder would much more; yet such to some appear.' 

For voyagers to return from that new world with stories 
of its being peopled with human beings like themselves, 
was a kind of blasphemy intolerable to all honest 
Christians. The council of clerical sages which as- 
sembled in the Dominican Convent of St. Stephen, at 
Salamanca, in i486, to take into consideration the theory 
of Columbus as to a Cathaya, or other world of hu- 
manity lying beyond the Atlantic, after bringing all 
the science and philosophy of the age to bear on the 
subject, pronounced the idea of the earth's spherical 
form heterodox, and a belief in antipodes incompatible 
with the historical traditions of our faith : since to assert 
that there were inhabited lands on the opposite side of 
the globe, would be to maintain that there were nations 
not descended from Adam, it being impossible for them 
to have passed the intervening ocean. This would 
be, therefore, to discredit the Bible, which expressly 
declares that all men are descendants of one common 
pair. 

It is amusing, but also instructive, thus to find an 
ethnological problem of our own day adduced by the 
orthodox sages of Salamanca in the fifteenth century 
to prove that America could not exist. It is obvious 
enough, that with such Dominican philosophers in 
the councils of science, it was safer for their orthodoxy 
as well as their credibility, for travellers to tell of 
' anthropophagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath 
their shoulders,' than to hint of a race of ordinary men 
and women. This kind of union of scepticism and 
credulity belongs exclusively to no special epoch. A 



THE MONSTER CALIBAN. 



story is told of a Scottish sailor returning to his old 
mother, and greeting her with an account of the wonders 
he had seen in far-away lands and seas. But his most 
guarded narrations conflicted so entirely with her per- 
sonal experience that they were repelled as wholly 
incredible. ' Weel, mother,' said the baffled traveller, 
' what will ye say when I tell you that, in sailing up 
the Red Sea, on pulling up our anchor, we fand ane 
o' Pharaoh's chariot-wheels on the fluke?' 'Ay, ay! 
Sandy, that I can weel believe,' responded the old 
dame; 'there's Scripture for that!' It was in a like 
critical spirit that the men of the fifteenth and sixteenth 
centuries refused all belief in the humanity of the 
antipodes, while they welcomed the most monstrous 
exaggerations for the very air of truthfulness they bore, 
when tried by their own canons of credibility. 

The reasoning of that age arranged itself in a very 
simple syllogism. All men were descended from Adam ; 
the beings inhabiting the worlds beyond the ocean could 
not possibly be descended from Adam ; therefore they 
were not human beings. Yet as truth slowly dawned 
through a whole century, it became more and more 
obvious that, whatever their pedigree might be, they 
had many points in common with humanity. They had 
a kind of speech of their own ; and could be taught 
with no great difficulty that of their discoverers. They 
had arts, arms, architecture and sculpture, and even 
religious rites, though of a very horrible kind. So the 
Spanish Dominicans pronounced them to be devils ; and 
yet did not wholly abandon the hope of converting 
them, and making them Christians after a sort. The 
English adventurers, having no love for the Spaniards 
of the New World, and a very special aversion to their 
priests, were the less likely to be guided by their 



THE MONSTER CALIBAN. 



estimation of the Carib or Mexican ; and hence there 
grew up a vague idea of inhabitants of the strange 
islands reported from time to time by returned voyagers, 
who, though they could not possibly be of the race of 
Adam, had yet a far nearer resemblance, in many ways, 
to our perfected humanity than any ape, baboon, or 
other anthropomorphous being with which older tra- 
vellers had made them familiar. 

On this ideal Shakespeare unquestionably wrought in 
the creation of that ' freckled whelp,' as disproportioned 
in manners as in shape, whom Prospero found sole 
habitant of the lonely island on which he and Miranda 
were cast. As to Caliban's maternity, the theories of 
man's descent, and the consequent transitional stages 
of an unperfected humanity, with which we are now 
familiar, are of very modern date, and did not at all 
lie in Shakespeare's vein, whatever Bacon might have 
said of them. Unless the poet had contented himself 
with simply letting Prospero find the strange monster 
on the island, he had, like more modern philosophers, 
to account in some way for his being; and so he vaguely 
hints at supernatural conception, known to Prospero 
only at second-hand. For the witch Sycorax had died, 
and Ariel had writhed and groaned for years, imprisoned 
in the rifted pine where she had left him, till Prospero 
arrived and set him free. ' As thou report'st thyself,' 
is accordingly the form in which Prospero alludes to 
Sycorax and all else that pertained to those prehistoric 
island-times before he set foot there. Sufficient for us, 
therefore, is it, that the Duke of Milan found on that 
strange island just such a monstrous being as travellers' 
tales had already made familiar to all men as natives 
of such regions. The tPrrrr, _J^nrib nn d C nn nihnl -wrx r 
syjT^rrymous. The edicts of Isabella expressly excluded 



THE MONSTER CALIPAX. 



the Carribeans from all the ordinary rights of humanity 
on this very ground. They therefore were the anthro- 
pophagi of travellers ' tales ; and Caliban is but an 
anagram of the significant name. 

' Do you put tricks upon us with savages and men 
of Ind ? ' says Stephano ; while the drunken Trinculo, 
puzzling, in his besotted fashion, over Caliban, who has 
fallen flat at his approach in the hope of escaping 
notice, exclaims : ' What have we here ? a man or a 
fish ? A strange fish ! Were I in England now, as once 
I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday 
fool there but would give a piece of silver ; there would 
this monster make a man ; any strange beast there 
makes a man ; when they will not give a doit to relieve 
a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead 
Indian. Legged like a man ! and his fins like arms ! 
Warm, o' my troth ! I do now let loose my opinion ; 
hold it no longer : this is no fish, but an islander, that 
hath lately suffered by a thunderbolt.' It would be 
curious to recover an exact delineation of the Caliban of 
the Elizabethan stage. ' This is a strange thing as e'er 
I looked on,' is the exclamation of the King of Naples, 
when Caliban is driven in, along with the revellers who 
have been plotting who should ' be king o' the isle ; ' and 
on his brother, Sebastian, asking, "What things are 
these, my Lord Antonio ? ' he replies : ' One of them is 
a plain fish, and no doubt marketable.' There was 
obviously something marine, or fish-like, in the aspect 
of the island monster. ' In the dim obscurity of the 
past,' says Darwin, ' we can see that the early 
progenitor of all the vertebrae must have been an 
aquatic animal ; ' in its earliest stages ' more like the 
larvae of our existing marine Ascidians than any 
other known form,' but destined in process of time, 



74 THE MONSTER CALIBAN. 

through lancelot, ganoid, and other kindred tran- 
sitions, to — 

' Suffer a sea change 
Into something rich and strange.' 

In Caliban there was undesignedly embodied, seemingly, 
an ideal of the latest stages of such an evolution. Mr. 
Joseph Hunter in dealing with this, as with other details, 
in his ' Disquisition on Shakespeare's Tempest,' lets his 
learning come into needless conflict with the idealisa- 
tion of the poet. He will by no means admit of so 
simple a solution of the name of Caliban as the mere 
metathesis of cannibal, but goes in search for it among 
the many names by which Gaspar, Melchior, and Bal- 
thazar, the three magi, were known throughout medieval 
Europe. In like fashion he finds his form to be of 
Hebraistic origin, and not at all 'a pure creation of 
Shakespeare's own mind.' He accordingly proceeds to 
'compare him with the fish-idol of Ashdod, the Dagon 
of the Philistines : — 

" Sea-monster ! upward man, 
And downward fish." — P. L., Bk. i. 

' Here we have also a figure half-fish, half-man ; ' and 
so the learned commentator proceeds to questions of 
Rabbinical literature ; discusses how the two elements 
of fish and man coalesced in the form of Dagon ; quotes 
Abarbinel and Kimchi ; and finally arrives at this con- 
clusion : ' The true form of Dagon was a figure shaped 
like a fish, only with feet and hands like a man. Now 
this is precisely the form of Shakespeare's Caliban, " a 
fish legged like a man, and his fins like arms." Nothing 
can be more precise than the resemblance. The two 
are in fact one, as to form. Caliban is therefore a kind 
of tortoise, the paddles expanding in arms and hands, 
legs and feet. And accordingly, before he appears upon 



THE MO.VSTER CALIBAN. 



the stage, the audience are prepared for the strange 
figure by the words of Prospero : — 

" Come forth, thou tortoise ! " 

' How he became changed into a monkey, while the play 
is full of allusions to his fish-like form,' the learned 
critic leaves to others to explain. 

There is an amusing literalness in this application 
alike of the confused ideas of the drunken Trinculo, and 
of the invective of Prospero. The wrathful magician 
calls to the creature whom Miranda has been denouncing 
as a villain, — ' What ho ! slave ! Caliban ! Thou earth, 
thou ! ' and as he still lingers, muttering his refusal, 
Prospero shouts, ' Come forth, I say ; come, thou tor- 
toise ! when ? ' In a milder mood he might have said, 
' Come, thou snail ! ' expressing thereby the same idea 
of tardy reluctant obedience, with equally little reference 
to his form. 

In reality, though by some scaly or fin-like appen- 
dages, the idea of a fish, or sea-monster, is suggested 
to all, the form of Caliban is, nevertheless, essentially 
human. In a fashion more characteristic of Milton's 
than of Shakespeare's wonted figure of speech, this is 
affirmed in language that no doubt purposely suggests 
the opposite idea to the mind, where Prospero says : — 

' Then was this island — 
Save for the son that she did litter here, 
A freckled whelp, hag-born, — not honoured with 
A human shape.' 

The double bearing of this is singularly expressive : — save 
for this son of Sycorax, the island was not honoured 
with a human shape. And, having thus indicated that 
his shape was human, by the use of the terms ' whelp ' 
and ' littered ' the brutish ideal is strongly impressed on 



76 THE MONSTER CALIBAN. 

the mind. But his strictly anthropomorphic character 
is delicately suggested in other ways. When Miranda 

says of Ferdinand — 

'This 
Is the third man that e'er I saw, the first 
That e'er I sigh'd for,' 

she can only refer to her father and Caliban. In this the 
poet purposely glances at the simplicity of the inex- 
perienced maiden, to whom the repulsive monster had 
hitherto been the sole ideal of manhood presented to her 
mind, apart from the venerable Prospero. How far he 
falls short of all manly perfections is indicated imme- 
diately afterwards in the contrast instituted between him 
and Ferdinand : — 

' Thou think'st there are no more such shapes as he, 
Having seen but him and Caliban. Foolish wench ! 
To the most of men this is a Caliban, 
And they to him are angels.' 

This is, of course, the purposed exaggeration of Prospero, 
in his fear ' lest too light winning make the prize light.' 
But so soon as Miranda has become thoroughly im- 
pressed with the image of her new-found lover, with ' no 
ambition to see a goodlier man,' she ceases to think of 
Caliban as a being to be associated with him in common 
manhood. When, accordingly, she responds to Ferdi- 
nand's admiring exclamation — 

' But you, O you, 
So perfect and so peerless, are created 
Of every creature's best,' 

it is by a declaration which wholly ignores Caliban's 
claims to rank in the same order of beings with those 
among whom she had so recently classed him. 

' I do not know 
One of my sex ; no woman's face remember, 



THE MONSTER CALIBAN. 



Save, from my glass, mine own; nor have I seen 
More that I may call men, than you, good friend, 
And my dear father.' 

In this way the gradual expansion of the ideas of this 
innocent maiden are traced by the most delicate indi- 
cations ; until at length, when Alonzo and his company 
are introduced into Prospero's cell, where Ferdinand and 
Miranda are seated, playing at chess, she exclaims — 

' Oh ! wonder ! 
How many goodly creatures are there here ! 
How beauteous mankind is! O b:ave new world 
That has such people in't ! ' 

The development being thus completed, and the per- 
fection of true manhood fairly presented to her eye and 
mind, Caliban is then introduced, with the awe-struck 
exclamation — 

' O Setebos, these be brave spirits indeed ! ' 

and immediately thereafter we have the remark of 
Antonio — ' One of them is a plain fish, and no doubt 
marketable.' He is a 'thing of darkness,' as Prospero 
calls him ; a being ' as disproportioned in his manners as 
in his shape;' yet nevertheless so closely approximating, 
in the main, to ordinary humanity, that Miranda had 
associated him in her own mind, along with her father, 
as ' honoured with a human shape.' 

Again, we are furnished with a tolerably definite clue 
to the age which Caliban has attained at the date of his 
introduction to our notice. Littered on the island soon 
after the reputed arrival of Sycorax, we learn that that 
malignant hag, unable to subdue the delicate Ariel to 
the execution of her abhorred commands, imprisoned 
him in the cloven pine, where he groaned out twelve 
wretched years, till relieved from his torments by the art 
of Prospero. Next, it appears from the discourse of her 



THE MONSTER CALIBAN. 



father to Miranda that she has grown up on that lonely 
island for a like period. ' Twelve years since, Miranda, 
thy father was the Duke of Milan, and a prince of 
power.' But she was not then three years old, and so 
the memory of that former state, and of the maidens 
who tended her in her father's palace, has faded away, 
' far off, and like a dream ; ' while the banished Duke, 
' rapt in secret studies,' his library ' a dukedom 
large enough,' had more and more perfected himself in 
occult science, until he learns by its aid that now the 
very crisis of their fates has come. Caliban is, there- 
fore, to all appearance in his twenty-fifth year, as we 
catch a first glimpse of this pre-Darwinian realisation of 
the intermediate link between brute and man. It seems 
moreover to be implied that he has already passed his 
maturity. At an earlier age than that at which man 
is capable of self-support, the creature had been aban- 
doned to the solitude of his island-home, and learned 
with his long claws to dig for pig-nuts ; and now, says 
Prospero, ' as with age his body uglier grows, so his 
mind cankers.' We may conceive of the huge canine 
teeth and prognathous jaws which in old age assume 
such prominence in the higher quadrumana. Darwin 
claims for the bonnet-monkey ' the forehead which 
gives to man his noble and intellectual appearance ; ' 
and it is obvious that it was not wanting in Caliban : for 
when he discovers the true quality of the drunken fools 
he has mistaken for gods, his remonstrance is, ' we shall 
all be turned to apes with foreheads villainous low.' 
Here then is the highest developement of ' the beast 
that wants discourse of reason.' He has attained to 
all the maturity his nature admits of, and so is perfect 
as the study of a living creature distinct from, yet next 
in order below the level of humanity. 



THE MONSTER CALIBAX. 



The being thus called into existence for the purposes 
of dramatic art is a creation well meriting the thought- 
ful study of the modern philosopher, whatever deduc- 
tions he may have based on the hypotheses of recent 
speculation. Caliban's is not a brutalised, but a natural 
brute mind. He is a being in whom the moral in- 
stincts of man have no part ; but also in whom the 
degradation of savage humanity is equally wanting. 
He is a novel anthropoid of a high type — such as on 
the hypothesis of evolution must have existed inter- 
mediately between the ape and man, — in whom some 
spark of rational intelligence has been enkindled, under 
the tutorship of one who has already mastered the 
secrets of nature. We must not be betrayed into a too 
literal interpretation of the hyperboles of the wrathful 
Duke of Milan. He is truly enough the ' freckled 
whelp' whom Prospero has subdued to useful services, as 
he might break in a wild colt, or rear a young wolf to 
do his bidding, though in token of higher capacity he 
has specially trained him to menial duties peculiar to 
man. For not only does he ' fetch in our wood,' as 
Prospero reminds his daughter, ' and serves in offices 
that profit us,' but 'he does make our fire.' 

No incident attending the discovery of the New World 
is more significant than that of Columbus stationed on 
the poop of the Santa Maria, his eye ranging along the 
darkened horizon, when the sun had once more gone 
down on the disappointed hopes of the voyagers. 
Suddenly a light glimmered in the distance, once and 
again reappeared to the eyes of Pedro Gutierrez and 
others whom the great admiral summoned to catch this 
gleam of realised hopes ; and then darkness and doubt 
resumed their reign. But to Columbus all was light. 
That feeble ray had told of the presence of the fire- 



THE MONSTER CALIBAX. 



maker, man. The natural habits of Caliban, however, 
are those of the denizen of the woods. We may conceive 
of him like the pongoes of Mayombe, described by 
Purchas, who would come and sit by the travellers' 
deserted camp-fire, but had not sense enough to re- 
plenish it with fuel. We have no reason to think of him 
as naturally a cooking or fire-using animal ; though, 
under the training of Prospero, he proves to be so far in 
advance of the most highly developed anthropoid as to 
be capable of learning the art of fire-making. 

' We'll visit Caliban, my slave, who never yields us 
kind answers,' Duke Prospero says to his daughter in the 
second scene of ' The Tempest,' where they first appear, 
and Caliban is introduced ; but the gentle Miranda 
recalls with shuddering revulsion the brutal violence of 
their strange servitor, and exclaims with unwonted 
vehemence : ' 'Tis a villain, sir, I do not love to look on.' 
But repulsive as he is, his services cannot be dispensed 
with. ' As 'tis, we cannot miss him,' is Prospero's reply ; 
and then, irritated alike by the sense of his obnoxious 
instincts and reluctant service, he heaps opprobrious epi- 
thets upon him : ' What, ho ! slave ! Caliban ! thou earth, 
thou ! Come forth, I say, thou tortoise ! ' and at length, 
as he still lingers, muttering in his den, Prospero breaks 
out in wrath — ' Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil 
himself upon thy wicked dam, come forth ! ' Schlegel 
and Hazlitt accordingly speak in nearly the same terms 
of ' the savage Caliban, half brute, half demon ; ' while 
Gervinus — although elsewhere characterising him with 
more appreciative acumen as ' an embryonic being de- 
filed as it were by his earthly origin from the womb of 
savage nature,' — does, with prosaic literalness, assume 
that his mother was the witch Sycorax, and the devil 
his father. Shakespeare assuredly aimed at the depiction 



THE MOXSTER CALIBAN. 



of no such foul ideal. It is the recluse student of nature's 
mysteries, and not the poor island monster that is 
characteristically revealed in such harsh vituperations. 
Prospero habitually accomplishes his projects through 
the agency of enforced service. He has usurped a power 
over the spirits of air, as well as over this earth-born 
slave ; and both are constrained to unwilling obedience. 
Hence he has learned to exact and compel service to 
the utmost ; to count only on the agency of enslaved 
power : until an imperious habit disguises the promptings 
of a generous and kindly nature. With all his tender- 
ness towards the daughter whose presence alone has 
made life endurable to him, he flashes up in sudden ire 
at the slightest interference with his plans for her ; as 
when she interposes on behalf of Ferdinand, he exclaims 
— ' Silence ! One word more shall make me chide thee, if 
not hate thee.' He is indeed acting an assumed part, 
'lest too light winning' should make the lover under- 
value his prize ; but it is done in the imperious tone with 
which habit has taught him to respond to the slightest 
thwarting of his commands. This is still more apparent 
in his dealings with the gentle Ariel, who owes to him 
delivery from cruellest bondage. The relations subsisting 
between them are indicated with rare art, and are as 
tender as is compatible with beings of different elements. 
The sylph is generally addressed in kindly admiring 
terms, as ' my brave spirit,' ' my tricksy spirit,' ' my 
delicate, my dainty Ariel' Yet on the slightest ques- 
tioning of Prospero's orders, he is told : ' Thou liest, 
malignant thing ! ' and on the mere show of murmuring 
is threatened with durance more terrible than that from 
which he has been set free. 

In all this the characteristics of the magician are con- 
sistently wrought out. According to the ideas of an age 
G 



THE MONSTER CALIBAN. 



which still believed in magic, he has usurped the lord- 
ship of nature, and subdued to his will the spirits of the 
elements, by presumptuous, if not altogether sinful arts. 
They are retained in subjection by the constant exercise 
of this supernatural power, and yield him only the reluc- 
tant obedience of slaves. This has to be borne in re- 
membrance, if we would not misinterpret the ebullitions 
of imperious harshness on the part of Prospero towards 
beings who can only be retained in subjection by such 
enforced mastery. That Caliban regards him with 
as malignant a hatred as the caged and muzzled, bear 
may be supposed to entertain towards his keeper, is set 
forth with clear consistency. Nor is it without abundant 
reason. He is dealt with not merely as a 'lying slave, 
whom stripes may move, not kindness ; ' but by his 
master's magical art, the most familiar objects of nature 
are made instruments of torture. They pinch, affright 
him, pitch him into the mire, as deceptive fire-brands 
mislead him in the dark, grind his joints with con- 
vulsions, contort his sinews with cramp, and, as he says, 

' For every trifle are they set upon me : 
Sometimes like apes, that mow and chatter at me, 
And after bite me : then like hedgehogs, which 
Lie tumbling in my barefoot way, and mount 
Their pricks at my footfall ; sometimes am I 
All wound with adders, who with cloven tongues 
Do hiss me into madness.' 

To reconcile such harsh violence with the merciful 
forgiving character of Prospero in his dealings with 
those who, after having done him the cruellest wrongs, 
are placed in his power, we have to conceive of the 
outcast father and child compelled in their island 
solitude to subdue a gorilla, or other brute menial, 
to their service ; and, after in vain trying kindness, 
driven in self-defence to protect themselves from its 



THE MONSTER CALIBAN. 



brutal violence. The provocation which had roused the 
unappeasable wrath of Miranda's father was indeed great; 
but recognising the 'most poor credulous monster' as the 
mere brute that he is, it involved no moral delinquency; 
and therefore he is not to be regarded as devilish in 
origin and inclinations, because he tells Stephano what 
is literally true — ' I am subject to a tyrant, a sorcerer, 
that by his cunning hath cheated me of the island.' He 
accordingly invites the drunken butler to be his sup- 
planter : — 

' If thy greatness will 
Revenge it on him, — for I know thou darest, — 
Thou shalt be lord of it, and I'll serve thee.' 

He gloats on the idea of braining the tyrant, just as an 
abused human slave might, and indeed many a time has 
done. 

' Why, as I told thee, 'tis a custom with him 
r the afternoon to sleep : there thou mayst brain him, 
Having first seized his books ; or with a log 
Batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake, 
Or cut his weazand with thy knife. Remember 
First to possess his books; for without them 
He's but a sot, as I am, nor hath not 
One spirit to command : they all do hate him 
As rootedly as I.' 

All this would be hateful enough in a human being ; but 
before we pronounce Caliban a ' demi-devil,' we must 
place alongside of him the butler Stephano, who, with 
no other provocation than that of a base nature, and 
with no wrongs whatever to avenge, is ready with 
the response — 'Monster, I will kill this man; his 
daughter and I will be king and queen, and Trinculo 
and thyself shall be viceroys ; ' and so the poor servant 
monster already fancies his slavery at an end, and ex- 
claims, ' Freedom, hey-day ! hey-day, freedom ! ' 

He who undertakes to subdue the wild nature of ape, 
G 2 



84 THE MONSTER CALIBAN. 

leopard, wolf, or tiger, must not charge it with moral 
delinquency when it yields to its native instincts. It 
maybe, as modern science would teach us, that our most 
human characteristics are but developed instincts of the 
brute ; for the churl 

' Will let his coltish nature break 
At seasons through the gilded pale.' 

The savage, though familiarised with habits of civili- 
sation, reverts with easy recoil to his barbarian licence ; 
and the highest happiness which the tamed monster of 
the island could conceive of, was once more to range in 
unrestrained liberty, digging up the pig-nuts with his 
long nails, or following the jay and the nimble marmoset 
over rock and tree. But there is nothing malignant in 
this ; and that nothing essentially repulsive is to be 
assumed as natural to him is apparent from the very 
invectives of Prospero : — 

' Thou most lying slave, 
Whom stripes may move, not kindness : I have used thee, 
Filth as thou art, with human care ; and lodged thee 
In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate 
The honour of my child.' 

Leaving aside, then, the exaggerations of the incensed 
Prospero, which have their legitimate place in the de- 
velopment of the drama, let us study, as far as may be, 
the actual characteristics of the strange islander. His 
story is told, briefly indeed, yet with adequate minute- 
ness. Prospero retorts on him the recapitulation of 
kindnesses which had been repaid with outrage never to 
be forgiven : — 

' Abhorred slave, 
Which any print of goodness will not take, 
Being capable of all ill ! I pitied thee, 
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour 
One thing or other : when thou didst not, savage, 
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like 



THE MOXSTER CALIBAN. 



A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes 
With words that made them known. But thy vile race, 
Though thou didst learn, had that in't which good natures 
Could not abide to be with.' 

In other words, he proved to be simply an animal, 
actuated by the ordinary unrestrained passions and 
desires which in the brute involve no moral evil, and 
but for the presence of Miranda would have attracted 
no special notice. Situated as he actually is, he is not 
to be judged of wholly from the invectives of his master. 
With brute instincts which have brought on him the 
condign punishment of Prospero, and a savage nature 
which watches, like any wild creature under harsh 
restraint, for escape and revenge, his feelings are never- 
theless rather those of the captive bear than of ' one 
who treasures up a wrong.' There is in him still a dog- 
like aptitude for attachment, a craving even for the 
mastership of some higher nature, and an appreciation of 
kindness not unlike that of the domesticated dog, though 
conjoined with faculties of intelligent enjoyment more 
nearly approximating to humanity. When compelled 
reluctantly to emerge from his den, he enters muttering 
curses ; yet even they have a smack of nature in them. 
They are in no ways devilish, but such as the wild 
creature exposed to the elements may be supposed to 
recognise as the blight and mildew with which Nature 
gratifies her ill-will. He imprecates on his enslaver — 

' As wicked dew as e'er my mother brushed 
With raven's feather from unwholesome fen 
Drop on you both ! A south-west blow on ye 
And blister you all o'er ! ' 

Prospero threatens him with cramps, side-stitches that 
shall pen his breath up, urchins to prick him, and 
pinching pains more stinging than the bees ; but his 



86 THE MONSTER CALIBAN. 

answer has no smack of fiendishness, though he does 
retort with bootless imprecations. He stolidly replies — 

' I must eat my dinner. 
This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother, 
Which thou takest from me. When thou earnest first, 
Thou strokedst me, and madest much of me ; wouldst give me 
Water with berries in't; and teach me how 
To name the bigger light, and how the less, 
That burn by day and night ; and then I loved thee, 
And shew'd thee all the qualities o' the isle, 
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile ; 
Cursed be I that did so! All the charms 
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you! 
For I am all the subjects that you have, 
Which first was mine own king ; and here you sty me 
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me 
The rest o' the island.' 

Prospero replies to him as a creature ' whom stripes may- 
move, not kindness,' who had been treated companion- 
ably, with human care, till his brute instincts compelled 
the subjection of him to such restraint. He describes 
the pity with which he at first regarded the poor monster, 
whose brutish gabble he had trained to the intelligent 
speech which is now used for curses. In all this do we 
not realise the ideal anthropoid in the highest stage of 
Simian evolution, stroked and made much of like a 
favourite dog, fed with dainties, and at length taught to 
frame his brute cries into words by which his wishes 
could find intelligible utterance. The bigger and the 
lesser light receive names, and are even traced, as we 
may presume, to their origin. But the intellectual de- 
velopment compasses, at the utmost, a very narrow 
range ; and when the drunken Stephano plies him with 
his bottle of sack, the dialogue runs in this characteristic 
fashion : — 

' Steph. How now, moon-calf ? how does thine ague ? 
Cal. Hast thou not dropt from heaven ? 



THE MONSTER CALIBAN. 



Stepb. Out o' the moon, I do assure thee : I was the man in the 
moon, when time was. 

Cal. I have seen thee in her, and I do adore thee. 
My mistress shewed me thee, and thy dog, and thy bush. 

Steph. Come, swear to that ; kiss the book : I will furnish it anon 
with new contents : swear. 

Trin. By this good light, this is a very shallow monster ! I am afeard 
of him ! A very weak monster ! The man i' the moon ! A most poor 
credulous monster ! Well drawn, monster, in good sooth ! 

Cal. I'll shew thee every fertile inch o' the island ; 
And I will kiss thy foot: 1 pr'ythee, be my god.' 

But we presently see Caliban in another and wholly 
different aspect. Like the domesticated animal, which 
he really is, he has certain artificial habits and tastes 
superinduced in him ; but whenever his natural instincts 
reveal themselves we see neither a born devil, nor a be- 
ing bearing any likeness to degraded savage humanity. 
He is an animal at home among the sounds and scenes 
of living nature. 'Pray you, tread softly, that the 
blind mole may not hear a footfall,' is his exhorta- 
tion to his drunken companions as they approach 
the entrance of Prospero's cell. When Trinculo frets 
him, his threatened revenge is, 'He shall drink nought 
but brine ; for I'll not show him where the quick freshes 
are ; ' and he encourages his equally rude companion 
with the assurance — 

'Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, 
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. 
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments 
Will hum about mine ears ; and sometimes voices, 
That, if I then had waked after long sleep, 
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming, 
The clouds, methought, would open, and shew riches 
Ready to drop upon me ; that, when I waked, 
I cried to dream again.' 

To the drunken butler and his comrade, Caliban is ' a 
most poor credulous monster ! a puppy-headed, scurvy, 



88 THE MONSTER CALIBAN. 

abominable monster ! a most ridiculous monster ! ' and 
when, by their aid, he has drowned his tongue in sack, 
he is no more to them than a debauched fish. But 
Shakespeare has purposely placed the true anthropo- 
morphoid alongside of these types of degraded humanity, 
to shew the contrast between them. He is careful to 
draw a wide and strongly-marked distinction between 
the coarse prosaic brutality of debased human nature, 
and the inferior, but in no ways degraded, brute nature 
of Caliban. ' He is,' says Prospero, ' as disproportioned 
in his manners as in his shape.' He had associated for 
years in friendly dependence, lodged with Prospero in 
his own cell ; for we have to remember that Miranda 
was but three years old when her father took in hand 
the taming of the poor monster, and used him with 
human care, until compelled to drive him forth to his 
rocky prison. His narrow faculties have thus been 
forced into strange development ; but though the 
wrathful Prospero pronounces him a creature ' which any 
print of goodness will not take, being capable of all ill,' 
that is by no means the impression which the poet 
designs to convey. Man, by reason of his higher nature 
which invites him to aspire, and his moral sense which 
clearly presents to him the choice between good and 
evil, is capable of a degradation beyond reach of the 
brute. The very criminality which has so hardened 
Prospero's heart against his poor slave, involves to him- 
self no sense of moral wrong. 'O ho! O ho! would it had 
been done ! ' is his retort to Prospero ; ' thou didst 
prevent me ; I had peopled else this isle with Calibans.' 

The distinction between the coarse sensuality of 
degraded humanity, and this most original creation of 
poetic fancy, with its gross brute-mind, its limited 
faculties, its purely animal cravings and impulses, is 






THE MONSTER C A LIB, IX. 89 

maintained throughout. The first scene opens with the 
sailors, released from all ordinary deference and restraint 
by the perils of the storm, shouting and blaspheming in 
reckless desperation ; and no sooner are they ashore 
than Caliban is brought into closest relations with the 
still more worthless topers who win his admiration, till 
experience teaches him — 

' What a thrice-double ass 
Was I, to take this drunkard for a god, 
And worship this dull fool ! ' 

The dog-like attachment which had drawn him to 
Prospero, till harsh treatment and restraint eradicated 
this feeling, and utterly alienated him from his first 
master, is transferred to the next being who treats him 
with any appearance of kindness. ' I'll shew thee every 
fertile inch o' the island,' is the first form in which his 
gratitude finds utterance ; 

'I'll shew thee the best springs; I'll pluck thee berries; 
I'll fish for thee, and get thee wood enough. 
A plague upon the tyrant that I serve ! 
I'll bear him no more sticks, but follow thee, 
Thou wondrous man.' 

The drunken butler, with his bottle of sack, seems 
to the poor monster to have dropped from heaven, or 
rather from the moon, where once his mistress showed 
him that favourite myth of old popular folk-lore, the 
man-in-the-moon, with his dog and bush : and so he 
fawns on him as a dog might on an old acquaintance. 
5 A most ridiculous monster,' thinks Trinculo, ' to make 
a wonder of a poor drunkard ; ' but Caliban is ready to 
lavish all his dog-like fidelity on his new-found master. 

' I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow ; 
And I, with my long nails, will dig thee pig-nuts ; 
Shew thee a jay's nest, and instruct thee how 
To snare the nimble marmoset ; I'll bring thee 



THE MONSTER CALIBAN. 



To clustering filberts; and sometimes I'll get thee 
Young scamels from the rock. Wilt thou go with me ? ' 

If we can conceive of a baboon endowed with speech, 
and moved by gratitude, have we not here the very- 
ideas to which its nature would prompt it. It is a crea- 
ture native to the rocks and the woods, at home in the 
haunts of the jay and marmoset : a fellow-creature of 
like nature and sympathies with themselves. The talk 
of the ship's crew is not only coarse, but even what it is 
customary to call brutal ; while that of Stephano and 
Trinculo accords with their debased and besotted 
humanity. Their language never assumes a rhythmical 
structure, or rises to poetic thought. But Caliban is in 
perfect harmony with the rhythm of the breezes and the 
tides. His thoughts are essentially poetical, within the 
range of his lower nature; and so his speech is, for the most 
part, in verse. He has that poetry of the senses which 
seems natural to his companionship with the creatures of 
the forest and the seashore. Even his growl, as he retorts 
impotent curses on the power that has enslaved him, 
is rhythmical. Bogs, fens, and the infectious exhalations 
that the sun sucks up, embody his ideas of evil ; and his 
acute senses are chiefly at home with the dew, and the 
fresh springs, the clustering filberts, the jay in his leafy 
nest, or the blind mole in its burrow. 

No being of all that people the Shakespearean drama 
more thoroughly suggests the idea of a pure creation of 
the poetic fancy than Caliban. He has a nature of his 
own essentially distinct from the human beings with 
whom he is brought in contact. He seems indeed the 
half-human link between the brute and man ; and 
realises, as no degraded Bushman or Australian savage 
can do, a conceivable intermediate stage of the anthro- 
pomorphous existence, as far above the most highly 



THE MONSTER CALIBAN. 



organised ape as it falls short of rational humanity. 
He excites a sympathy such as no degraded savage 
could. We feel for the poor monster, so helplessly in 
the power of the stern Prospero, as for some caged wild 
beast pining in cruel captivity, and rejoice to think of 
him at last free to range in harmless mastery over his 
island solitude. He provokes no more jealousy as the 
inheritor of Prospero's usurped lordship over his island 
home than the caged bird which has escaped to the 
free forest again. His is a type of development essen- 
tially non-human, — though, for the purposes of the drama, 
endued to an extent altogether beyond the highest at- 
tainments of the civilised, domesticated animal, with 
the exercise of reason and the use of language ; — a 
conceivable civilisation such as would, to a certain 
extent, run parallel to that of man, but could never 
converge to a common centre. 



CHAPTER VI. 

CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN. 

' Titled with many a name, almighty lord of immortals, 
Zeus, thou crown of creation, whose sway by law is directed, 
Hail ! It is right and just for mortals thus to approach thee : 
We are thy offspring. .We alone, of thy varied dependents 
Living and moving on earth, are gifted with speech to address thee.' 
Bymn of Cleanihes to Zeus. 

A PROPOSITION of no slight significance in the 
argument for man's evolution from the brute is 
that there is no evidence of his having been 'aboriginally 
endowed with the ennobling belief in the existence of an 
omnipotent God.' It seems more than doubtful, in the 
process of developed ideas and beliefs assigned to him, 
whether there is any room at a later stage for his 
receiving such belief as an ' endowment ' or a revelation. 
If, as the whole line of argument assumes, the character- 
istics of humanity are no more than the developed 
instincts of the brute, and all that is highest in our 
nature is but an evolution from the very lowest and 
meanest phenomena of mere vitality, the absence of any 
such ennobling belief in all the stages of life but the 
latest, is inevitable. The growing difficulty, indeed, is 
not so much to find man's place in nature, as to find 
any place left for mind : either that of the Supreme 
Omnipotence, or the immortal entity which it has been 
habitual to conceive of as the body's guest. 

It is not merely the pedigree of this highest verte- 
brate animal, Man, which is undoubtingly traced back 
to one of the lowest classes in the sub-kingdom of the 
mollusca. His intellect, his conscience, and his religious 



CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN. 93 

beliefs are but the latest ramifications of that primitive 
Ascidian germ which clung to the rocks on the shores of 
inconceivably ancient seas. Nor, indeed, must we think 
of the Ascidian as of the primeval seed-vessel of animal 
life, with all the possibilities of evolution embodied in it 
in embryo. The pedigree has indeed been carried back 
wondrous lengths ; but having got so far, why stop 
there ? The distinctions between the moluscoid on its 
tidal rock and the vegetable lichens beyond reach of the 
waves, is trifling compared with later feats of evolution. 
Life is present in both ; and if conscience, religion, the 
apprehension of truth, the belief in God and immortality, 
are all no more than developed or transformed animal 
sensations ; and intellect is only the latest elaboration of 
the perceptions of the senses : it need not surprise us that 
inquiry has already been extended in search of relations 
between the inorganic and the organic. On this new 
hypothesis of evolution ' what a piece of work is man ! ' 
and as for God, it is hard to see what is left for Him to 
do in the universe. 

But if we are limited to the conception of our physical 
organisation as the product of evolution, while the living 
soul is still allowed its divine origin, then, so far as 
creation is concerned, it matters little whether we are 
assumed to be literally made of the dust of the ground, 
or to have originated in Ascidian germs, and been at 
latest evolved from apes. The one transformation seems 
to be no less supernatural than the other. In so far as 
it is strictly a physiological and anatomical question, let 
physical science have untrammelled scope in deciding it ; 
but when it becomes a psychical question, it is not as a 
mere matter of sentiment that the mind revolts at a 
theory of evolution which professes to recognise its own 
emanation as no more than the accumulation of im- 



94 CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN. 

pressions and sensations of the nervous organisation 
gathered in the slow lapse of ages, until at last it has 
culminated in a moral sense. Our belief in a great 
First Cause is inextricably bound up with our belief 
in the human soul : mind first, then matter. It is an 
instinct of our being which arms us with patience 
against a thousand ills which the brute escapes from, 
because he 'wants discourse of reason,' and neither 
'looks before nor after.' Hence it is that we now 
turn with an altogether novel interest to Shakespeare's 
unprejudiced realisation of what is conceivable as the 
product of highest evolution in the brute. 

But a living poet, of rare objective power, yet not un- 
influenced by the spirit of his age, has aimed at carrying 
us a step further in the comprehension of the ideal brute- 
precursor, if not the progenitor, of man. Shakespeare 
fashioned for us the 'beast Caliban' in the sullenness of 
his harsh enslavement, hankering after the fresh springs 
and brine-pits ; or pining for the music of the winds as 
he goes a-nesting, or the long wash of the billows while 
he gathers the scamels from the rock, and chases the 
nimble crabs when tides are low. The isle is full of 
noises ; and though he has no linnet-note of his own, 
nor any such powers as those by which, according to 
Audubon, that Orpheus polyglottus, the American mock- 
ing-bird, puts to silence the Virginia nightingale and 
other mortified songsters of the woods, yet the sounds 
of nature hum welcomely about his ears, and soothe him 
to sleep. 

But it is not Caliban who sleeps, but Prospero 
and Miranda : — slumbering in full confidence that he 
drudges at their task ; — while our other poet, Robert 
Browning, pictures the poor monster, constrained by the 
very luxury of leisure snatched from toil, to give such 



CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN. 



reasoning powers as are developed in him a wider sweep, 
while he lets the rank tongue blossom into speech. The 
opening picture is one of sheer animal enjoyment : — 

' Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best, 
Flat on his belly, in the pit's much mire, 
With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin ; 
And while he kicks both feet in the cool slush, 
And feels about his spine small eft-things course, 
Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh ; 
And while above his head a pompion-plant, 
Coating the cave -top as a brow its eye, 
Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard, 
And now a flower drops with a bee inside, 
And now a fruit to snap at, catch, and crunch : 
He looks out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross 
And recross till they weave a spider-web, 
(Meshes of fire, some great fish breaks at times,) 
And talks to his own self, howe'er he please, 
Touching that other, whom his dam called God.' 

In the traditions of that prehistoric island-time, before 
Caliban had been endowed with speech, or Duke Pros- 
pero had come to rule with supernatural authority over 
the elemental powers, there had been impressed on that 
dim mind some perception of a power called divine. The 
modern students of man's place in nature have been 
much perplexed on the question of religion as an as- 
sumed attribute of man. Any doctrine of final causes is 
not to be tolerated ; and yet that out of nothing some- 
thing has come, with all the evolutions, physical and 
and moral, of that entity, is a kind of positivism against 
which reason rebels. It is legitimate, therefore, to in- 
quire whether the idea of God is innate in the human 
mind ; or if it be true, as has undoubtedly been affirmed 
by travellers, missionaries, and scientific observers, that 
there are races of men altogether devoid of religion. ' If,' 
says Sir John Lubbock, 'the mere sensation of fear, and 
the recognition that there are probably other beings 



96 CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN. 

more powerful than man, are sufficient alone to consti- 
tute a religion, then we must, I think, admit that religion 
is general to the human race.'' But, in reality, he sees in 
it no more than a child's dread of the darkness, which no 
one regards as a token of religious belief; or if it be, 
then the proof of the general existence of religion 
founded on this sensation of fear, will no longer limit it 
among the things peculiar to man. The feelings with 
which a dog regards its master partake of the like 
mingling of awe and dependent regard, as that which 
constitutes much of human religious feeling ; and as for 
rites and religious services, Sir John considers the baying 
of a dog to the moon as much an act of worship as some 
ceremonies which travellers have described as religious. 

If it could be shown that there is actually present in 
the savage mind such a mingled sense of awe and depen- 
dence on an unseen power as the dog recognises in re- 
lation to his master, there would remain no further room 
for doubt as to the existence of religion in the case. 
The late Dr. John Duncan, of New College, Edinburgh, 
or Rabbi Duncan as he is more generally styled, when 
bringing his acute metaphysical turn of speculation to 
bear on his own favourite dog, came to a conclusion that 
may seem wonderfully acceptable to the modern evolu- 
tionist. He recognised in little Topsy, not only what 
seemed to him many undeveloped elements of human 
nature, but something resembling a conscience toward 
man ; and he was wont to quote with favour the dictum 
of an old Puritan divine, that ' Man is a little god unto 
the lower animals ; their waiting eyes are fixed upon 
him, and he giveth them their meat in due season.' As 
to the state of mind of the dog when he bays the moon, 
or its precise ideas in relation to that ' lesser light,' we 
must await the revelations of some 'unusually wise' 



calibaa t , the metaphysician, 



canine philosopher. This, however, appears for our pre- 
sent purpose, according to the revelations of the poets, 
that there had been impressed on the dull brain of 
Caliban some idea of a supernatural, though by no 
means omnipotent power. Judging of supernal powers, 
and the Divine attributes, solely by his own experiences, 
the conclusions he arrives at are confused enough. He 
has far-off remembrances of Sycorax, terrible in her 
sorceries, unmitigable in her rage ; one so strong that 
she could control the moon, and command the ebb and 
flow of the tides : but yet altogether beneficent in her 
dealings with him. Very different are his perceptions 
of another overruling power, the tyrant Prospero, who, 
as he says, ' by sorcery got this isle, from me he got it,' 
and who continues to the present hour to manifest his 
omnipotence in very terrible judgments for every trifle. 
So far as Caliban's experiences went, this abhorred 
hag, the worker of sorceries too terrible for human 
utterance, was, according to his crude' Manichean creed, 
the representative of beneficent superhuman power ; 
while the sage Prospero — who with his nobler reason 
against his fury takes part, and recognises a choicer 
action in virtue than in vengeance, — appeared to him 
a malignant and wholly evil power. 

But besides those two potencies, of both of which 
Caliban has had actual sight and experience, there is 
that dam's god, Setebos. Prospero was not only a super- 
human power, but to him was all powerful. To resist 
his will was impossible. 

' His art is of such power, 
It would control my dam's god, Setebos, 
And make a vassal of him.' 

Yet that is a power not wholly mysterious. Caliban 

has learned to refer it, not to him, but to his art ; and 

H 



CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN. 



believes that, without his books he would not have one 
spirit to command : ' They all do hate him as rootedly 
as I.' But these books are the symbols, as well as the 
instruments of moral supremacy. So long as he holds 
these, the spirits may hate, but, like himself, they must 
tremble and obey ; for his power is such that it can con- 
trol even the divine Setebos, — a very puzzling state of 
things for such a mind to ponder over. In early days, 
when Prospero stroked and made much of his poor slave, 
Caliban yielded him a dog-like fidelity, and showed him 
all the qualities of the island. Now that their relations 
have so wholly changed, he hates him according to the 
hate of ' a thing most brutish,' and feels neither awe nor 
compunction, but only pleasure, at the idea that Stephano 

should , ,, rv , . 

' With a log 

Batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake, 

Or cut his weazand with his knife.' 

Setebos is a wholly different being from this : an invisi- 
ble and very vague divinity, on whom no such attempts 
are possible, inferior though he is in some sense to the 
artful Prospero. . Nevertheless it is inevitable that when 
Caliban takes to thinking of that other whom his dam 
called God, he should, like metaphysicians of more 
matured powers and higher advantages, realise little 
more than a being ' altogether such an one as himself.' 
And yet his ideas are confused and obscure, as is inevitable 
in the best attempts at reasoning on such supra-physical 
matters. Prospero's power is a very tangible reality to 
him : a power that admitted of no thought of resistance 
by its most unwilling slave ; and so he doubted not it 
could make a vassal of Setebos as well as of his poor 
self. But in these puzzlings of his, which the poet 
Browning records for us, over the origin of his little 
island-world, and the bigger and the less light that burn 



C A LIB AX, THE METAPHYSICIAN. 99 

by day and night for its special benefit, the vague un- 
seen Setebos seems fitter creator than the magician ; 
though as for the stars, they may be ' the poetry of 
heaven ; ' but in his present prosaic mood they do not 
seem much to concern him or his island, and so he 
fancies they may have come otherwise, it not being 
needful for the poor puzzled philosopher to say how. 

' Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos ! 
Thinketh He dwelleth i' the cold o' the moon. 
Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match, 
But not the stars ; the stars came otherwise ; 
Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that : 
Also this isle, what lives and grows thereon, 
And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.' 

If Setebos does indeed dwell in the cold moon, then 
Caliban, to whom cold is very unwelcome, can con- 
ceive of how such creation might come of the very 
restlessness of being ill at ease. The cold o' the moon 
is his dwelling-place. He cannot change his cold, nor 
cure its ache ; and so, in an uneasy way, he betakes 
himself to making clouds, meteors, the sun itself, to 
match his moon. For has not Caliban, as he sprawled 
in the heat of the day, on the breezy rocks that over- 
look the strand, 

' Spied an icy iish 
That longed to 'scape the rock-stream where she lived. 
And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine 
O' the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid, 
A crystal spike 'twixt two warm walls of wave ; 
Only she ever sickened, found repulse 
At the other kind of water, not her life, 
(Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o' the sun,) 
Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe, 
And in her old bounds buried her despair, 
Hating and loving warmth alike.' 

And so, judging accordingly — and like more learned 

philosophers sometimes mistaking deduction for induc- 

H 2 



CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN. 



tion, — Caliban surmises that he, in some such mood, 
made the sun, this isle, and so much else : fowl, beast, 
and creeping thing : — 

'Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech ; 
Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam, 
That floats and feeds ; a certain badger brown 
He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye 
By moonlight ; and the pie with the long tongue 
That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm, 
And says a plain word when she finds her prize, 
But will not eat the ants ; the ants themselves 
That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks 
About their hole — He made all these and more, 
Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?' 

But our modern poet has other purposes than merely 
to ingraft some island-details on that pure creative 
conception in which the genius of Shakespeare has 
revealed its mastery. If not metaphysical, like poor 
Caliban, he at any rate has Bridgewater philosophers, 
metaphysical realists, theologians — Calvinistic and anti- 
Calvinistic, — all in view. Setebos, the divine power in 
the island mythology — great First Cause, if not infinite 
originator, — is being comprehended by this very finite 
metaphysician. For instead of contentedly enjoying 
his comfortable sprawl in the mire, now that the heat 
of the day is at its best : Caliban suddenly finds him- 
self involved in all the subtleties of the Ego and 
Non-ego, and much else of a like kind, with results very 
much akin to the experiences of those whom Milton 
describes as retiring apart from their fellows who sang 
the songs of a lost heaven, and there they 
'Reasoned high 

Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate ; 

Fix'd fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute ; 

And found no end, in wandering mazes lost. 

Of good and evil much they argued then.' 

The reasoning, though pronounced ' vain wisdom all, and 



CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN. 



false philosophy,' may have suited metaphysical devils ; 
but it must be owned that Caliban, as the representative 
missing link — no ' born devil,' in spite of Prospero's 
imprecations, but only a poor half-witted brute, — gets 
terribly out of his depth. The modern searchers into 
the origin of man, and of his civilisation, marshal an 
imposing array of witnesses to the existence of tribes of 
men wholly destitute of any trace of religion. Some of 
their evidence is more than doubtful. We have only to 
remember one memorable example, to understand how 
men apply their own standards of religion to test its 
existence amongst others. 

In 1617, Dr. Laud, then Archdeacon of Huntingdon, 
paid his first visit to Presbyterian Scotland, as chap- 
lain to King James ; and finding there no such forms, 
ceremonies, or artistically-devised ritual as constituted 
to his mind the very essence of worship, he pro- 
nounced with grief of heart that there was ' no religion 
at all, that he could see ! ' We will pit Dr. Laud 
against the most reliable witnesses of the Evolutionists, 
as a trained expert in the discernment of visible re- 
ligions ; and yet other very trustworthy authorities 
seem to indicate that, in Scotland in that year, 161 7, 
and in subsequent years, the Scots really had some sort 
of thing deserving the name of religion, though Dr. 
Land could not see it. 

Among savages religion is not a thing to be talked 
of. Gods, manitous, spirits, the dead, are not to be 
named, save under the extremest urgency. The mere 
wayfaring traveller's report is valueless. The missionary 
has repeatedly found that he has not only used in his 
teaching, but given a place in his native version of the 
Scriptures, to religious terms that he has wholly mis- 
applied. The ideas themselves are undefined, and 



CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN. 



are apt to elude the questioner altogether, when he 
insists on a definition. We have ourselves tried, in 
converse with the Indians of North America, to get at 
their ideas on much simpler things than God, creation, 
free-will, or the belief in a future life ; and found it 
no easy matter to get them to entertain questions 
foreign to their ordinary current of thought. We were 
told by a Christian missionary who had laboured for 
years among the Chippeway Indians, preaching to 
them at first with the aid of a native interpreter, that 
he was shocked, when at a later date he listened to 
similar renderings of a young missionary's address into 
the language now familiar to him, to discover that 
nearly all the ideas most essential to the doctrines 
they sought to inculcate were lost in the process. The 
interpreter translated them into the pagan notions 
of the tribe, and so the Christian element was well- 
nigh eliminated, while the preacher complacently 
waited for the fruits of the seed he fancied to have 
been sown. 

It is necessary to know what shape the ideas of the 
supernatural have assumed to the savage mind, before 
it can be appealed to in any intelligible language. 
The difficulty indeed may be tested by trying to ob- 
tain an intelligent definition of an over-ruling provi- 
dence from the ordinary untutored mind. Put, for ex- 
ample, to the English peasant, unaccustomed to abstract 
thought, some of the questions on election, effectual 
calling, and the like points of Calvinistic theology, con- 
tained in " The Shorter Catechism " prepared by the 
Westminster divines for the use of children. You are 
speaking his own language, and have a good many 
ideas in common ; yet the answers will be vague and 
intangible enough. They may, however, help us to 



CALIBAN THE METAPHYSICIAN. 



understand how the savage mind may be interrogated 
in reference to its ideas of God, religion, a future state, 
creation, life, death, and much else, with results exceed- 
ingly misleading and deceptive. 

But however we may estimate the bearings of the 
evidence adduced, there is something very touching in 
the first narrative quoted by Sir John Lubbock in 
proof of the total absence of religious belief in the 
earlier savage stage. M. Bik is the authority ; and 
his subject is the Arafura of one of the islands lying be- 
tween New Guinea and North Australia. ' It is evident,' 
says the narrator, ' that the Arafuras of Vorkay possess 
no religion whatever. Of the immortality of the soul 
they have not the least conception. To all my in- 
quiries on this subject they answered, 'No Arafura has 
ever returned to us after death, therefore we know 
nothing of a future state ; and this is the first time we 
have heard of it.' The questioner was a passing 
voyager. of the Dourga, speaking through an interpre- 
ter, and as ignorant of the Arafura ideas of the soul, 
the future state, and other matters referred to, as if 
some German Kant were to demand of an English 
peasant concerning his belief in the empirical reality 
and transcendental ideality of space and time; or required 
from him a definition of his ideas of a priori intuition. 
His answer would be very much after the fashion of 
the Arafura, when desired to state his notions as to 
the creation of the world. ' None of us are aware of 
this ; we have never heard anything about it, and 
therefore do not know who has done it all.' The 
German philosopher might report very truly that he could 
not discover in the English peasant any notion of space 
or time, or indeed any innate ideas at all ; and yet he 
would convey a very false impression of the peasant's 



io 4 CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN. 

actual notions and beliefs. But M. Bik thus proceeds : 
' To convince myself more fully respecting their want of 
knowledge of a Supreme Being, I demanded of them 
on what they called for help in their need, when, far 
from their homes, engaged in the trepang fishery, their 
vessels were overtaken by violent tempests, and no 
human power could save them, their wives and chil- 
dren, from destruction. The eldest among them, after 
having consulted the others, answered that they knew 
not on whom they could call for assistance, but begged 
me, if I knew, to be so good as to inform them.' 

This is very tender and touching in its childlike 
simplicity ; but the mode adopted by the voyager to 
convince himself of the point aimed at was exceed- 
ingly deceptive. They no more prayed to God, or any 
unseen power, after his fashion, than the Presbyterians 
of Scotland did after the high Anglican fashion of 
Laud. But this by no means proves that they had 
no faith in the supernatural, no altar, like that of the 
Athenians, to the unknown God. As to the poor 
Arafuras' idea of a divine refuge in their hour of need, 
the savage mind is slow indeed to realise the idea of 
beneficent power. In truth the strongest argument 
against the evolution of the Christian religion from 
our own sensations and perceptions, is that it so utterly 
transcends the purest aspirations of the human soul, 
as to make it vain to imagine they could ever beget 
a ' Sermon on the Mount.' ' An eye for an eye, and 
a tooth for a tooth,' seems thoroughly human ; but 
' Blessed are the merciful,' ' the pure in heart,' and all 
the maxims of the Great Teacher, partake not of the 
humanity either of the first or of this nineteenth century. 

An Indian chief on Lake Superior explained to my- 
self the difference between the white man's God and 



CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN. 



his own Manitou, in this simple way : ' When the lake 
rises in a storm, and the north-west wind howls 
through the trees, and lightnings kindle them, we 
know that is the great Manitou, and we are afraid, 
and hide ourselves, We offer him much tobacco ; we 
try to avert his anger ; and are at peace again when 
he is gone. As for you white men, you call on your 
God, and want him to come to you. Are you not 
afraid of him ? ' The idea of the All-powerful being 
also the All-loving pertains alone to Christianity. The 
savage's conception of divine power in any sense is 
necessarily associated with the only moral qualities 
actively present in himself ; and as the strong savage 
tyrannises over the weak, and is very indifferent to his 
privations, his sufferings, or wrongs, he finds it hard 
to realise any idea of omnipotence dissociated from 
the disposition to abuse such power. The moral sense 
is weak, the passions are strong ; and love, generosity, 
or any golden rule of charity and beneficence is apt 
to appear to him an evidence of weakness rather than 
an expression of power. ' The mighty God, even the 
Lord hath spoken, and called the earth from the 
rising of the sun unto the going down thereof. Out 
of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God hath shined.' 
So says the inspired Hebrew poet. But when, as with 
the poor Arafura savage, ' God hath not spoken a 
single word ;' and he has been left to his own heart's 
devices, to turn his strength to cruelty, then the utter- 
ance might follow from the same song of praise, ' These 
things hast thou done, and I kept silence. Thou 
thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as 
thyself.' 

Another French traveller, M. Arbrousset, gives a 
very different account of the searching of Sekesa, an 



106 CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN. 

intelligent Kaffir, to find out God, while he still dwelt 
a lonely savage among the wilds of southern Africa. 
' Your tidings,' he said, ' are what I want ; and I was 
seeking before I knew you, as you shall hear. Twelve 
years ago, I went to feed my flocks. The weather 
was hazy. I sat down upon a rock and asked myself 
sorrowful questions : yes, sorrowful, because I was un- 
able to answer them. " Who has touched the stars 
with his hands ? on what pillars do they rest ? " I 
asked myself. " The waters are never weary ; they 
know no other law than to flow without ceasing from 
morning till night, and from night till morning : but 
where do they stop, and who makes them flow thus ? 
The clouds also come and go, and burst in water over 
the earth. Whence come they ? Who sends them ? 
The diviners certainly do not give us rain; for how 
could they do it ? And why do I not see them with 
my own eyes when they go up to heaven to fetch it ? " ' 
And so the Kaffir details his vain questionings, until 
he says, ' Then I buried my face in my hands.' Sir 
John Lubbock says of this : it is an exceptional case. 
In reality the question rises to our mind in relation to 
it, as to many similar reports of savage utterances : 
How much of this is, however undesignedly, due to the 
questioner ? Our own experience with the American 
savage is that it is only by slow and careful observation 
of his spontaneous utterances that any conception of his 
real beliefs can be arrived at. By means of leading 
questions you may get any answers you like. As a rule 3 
the savage will reply in the way he thinks you desire, 
however wide of the truth. It is difficult to evade some 
suspicion that the thoughts which troubled Sekesa's 
mind have acquired some of their definiteness in trans- 
mission through that of the narrator. 



CALIBAN. THE METAPHYSICIAN. 



The poet Browning, reasoning as his fashion is, as 
it were for the time being with the very brain and 
faculties of his subject, thus sets Caliban to work out 
his ideal of a Supreme Being, conceivable only as 
powerful, by no means as loving : — 

' He made all these, and more, 
Made all we see, and us, in spite : how else ? 

He could not, Himself, make a second self 

But did in envy, listlessness, or sport, 

Make what Himself would fain, in a manner, be — 

Look now, I melt a gourd-fruit into mash, 

Add honeycomb and pods, I have perceived, 

Which bite like finches when they bill and kiss, — 

Then when froth rises bladdery, drink up all, 

Quick, quick, till maggots scamper through my brain ; 

And throw me on my back i' the seeded thyme, 

And wanton, wishing I were born a bird. 

Put case, unable to be what I wish, 

I yet could make a live bird out of clay ; 

Would not I take clay, pinch my Caliban 

Able to fly ? — for, there, see, he hath wings, 

And great comb like the hoopoe's to admire, 

And there a sting to do his foes offence, 

There, and I will that he begin to live, 

Fly to yon rock-top, nip me off the horns 

Of grigs high up that make the merry din, 

Saucy, through thin-veined wings, and mind me not. 

In which feat, if his leg snapped, brittle clay, 

And he lay stupid-like,— why, I should laugh ; 

And, if he, spying me, should fall to weep, 

Beseech me to be good, repair his wrong. 

Bid his poor leg smart less, or grow again — 

Well, as the chance were, this might take, or else 

Not take my fancy : I might hear his cry, 

And give the manikin three, legs for his one, 

Or pluck the other off, leave him like an egg, 

And lessoned he was mine, and merely clay. 

Were this no pleasure, lying in the thyme, 

Drinking the mash, with brain become alive, 

Making and marring clay at will ? ' 

The later poet, it is obvious, has here lost sight of 
the ideal of man's brute-progenitor, — of the dimly 



CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN. 



reasoning chimpanzee or baboon, — and is rather be- 
thinking himself of greatly more modern controver- 
sialists. He is no longer with the Athenian free- 
thinker on Mars' Hill ; but among the proselytes of 
Rome, to whose questionings Paul responds in inter- 
rogatives, 'O man, who art thou that repliest against 
God ? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed 
it, Why hast thou formed me thus ? Hath not the 
potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make 
one vessel unto honour and another to dishonour ? ' 
Caliban, having no conception of mercy, self-sacrificing 
love, generosity, or other motives which exercise a 
sway over human action, and dimly reflect the highest 
attributes of God, 

' Thinketh such shows nor right nor wrong in Him, 
Nor kind, nor cruel : He is strong, and Lord. 
'Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs, 
That march now from the mountain to the sea; 
'Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first, 
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so. 
'Say the first straggler that boasts purple spots 
Shall join the pile, one pincer twisted off; 
'Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm, 
And two worms he whose nippers end in red ; 
As it likes me each time, I do : so He.' 

But that Setebos, the Creator, is capable of jealousy, 
envy of his own handiwork if it should seem to rival 
himself, is altogether natural to the mind of Caliban, — 
the metaphysical Caliban of the later poet. He has, 
himself, got to the length of creating ; is a tool-using 
animal; and does not see why, since Prospero transformed 
his own brutish gabble into speech, and ' endowed his 
purposes with words that made them known,' it might not 
be possible to render other noises tractable and respon- 
sive to the volitions of the utterer : say, for example, 



CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN. ico 

to make this pipe of his, made of the pithless elder- 
joint, prattle its own thoughts, instead of only screaming 
one note when it is blown through. ' Will you play on 
this pipe ? ' says the Prince of Denmark to Rosencrantz, 
when the courtier, as he perceives, is attempting to play 
on himself, though, as he owns, he knows not a touch of 
the little pipe. ' Why, look you now, how unworthy a 
thing you make of me ! You would play upon me ; you 
would seem to know my stops ; you would pluck out 
the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my 
lowest note to the top of my compass : and there is 
much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet 
cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood ! do you think I am 
easier to be played on than a pipe ? ' 

But then, Hamlet was no ordinary human pipe. The 
modern poet has given us a sort of anthropoid Hamlet, 
in his version of Caliban dealing with the natural 
theology of the island. Setebos, as the poor monster 
reasons to himself, may be good in the main ; — goodness 
mainly meaning with him, as with the Indian savage, 
unharmfulness. He may be placable, if his mind and 
ways were guessed aright : but then, if he takes to 
creating, the works of his hands must not presume to do 
anything unless through him. Suppose this pipe of 
Caliban's own manufacture, with which he can imitate 
the scream of the jay, were to take to blowing itself, 
and to boasting of its blowing, and of all the results of 
its music, as wholly its own : why then Caliban could 
endure no such presumption, and would crush it under 
foot. And if I, then so He ; — so Setebos, the Creator, 
with his creatures. Thus reasons Caliban : — 

' Hath cut a pipe of pithless elder-joint 
That, blown through, gives exact the scream o' the jay 
When from her wing you twitch the feathers blue; 



CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN. 



Sound this, and little birds that hate the jay 

Flock within stone's throw, glad their foe is hurt : 

Put case such pipe could prattle and boast forsooth, 

" I catch the birds, I am the crafty thing, 

I make the cry my maker cannot make 

With his great round mouth : he must blow through mine ! " 

Would not I smash it with my foot ? ' 

The self-made god, if it be fancy-wrought, and not 
carven of wood or stone, must take its pattern and 
compass from the conceiving mind. Under a process 
of evolution which begets religious reverence and wor- 
ship out of developed perceptions and sensations, the 
imagined deity will grow with the imagining devotee ; 
but it must derive all its attributes from him. The self- 
conceived God of the Arafura or Kaffir savage, will 
therefore be altogether such an one as himself, and can 
no more get beyond the mental conception of its 
originator than the quart can be contained in a pint 
measure. It is unquestionable that the divine ideal of 
the savage very frequently presents just such character- 
istics. It is hard indeed to recover any trace of an in- 
stinctive consciousness of God, or any clear realisation of 
immortality ; whatever we may make of his belief in an 
hereafter. In reality it is scarcely possible to formulate 
the dimly conceived ideas of the savage mind on such 
subjects. With man far above the savage state the inspira- 
tions of conscience and religious reverence are not easily 
reducible to written terms. They are indeed apt, not 
only to elude the formulist, but actually to disappear 
with the effort : as the synthetic processes of the poet's 
fancy are incompatible with the anatomisings of the 
critic. But if there be a human soul, distinct from the 
mere animal life ; and if there be also, as we believe, a 
wholly different God, for rudest savage as for civilised 
man, revealing Himself in the lilies of the field, in the 



CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN. 



fowls of the air. in the stars of night ; taking care of the 
sparrow, numbering the very hairs of our head; not very 
far from every one of us : — then it may be possible for 
man, even in a ruder state than the Kaffir Sekesa, dimly 
to conceive of that unknown God, whom Paul found the 
Athenians ignorantly worshipping : ' God that made the 
world and all things therein, the Lord of heaven and 
earth, who giveth to all life, and breath, and all things.' 

The religion of the old Greek had unquestionably 
more to do with the aesthetic faculty than the moral 
sense. His worship, to a large extent, addressed the 
sensuous emotions, and deceived himself, as fine ritual 
and solemn harmonies are apt to do, by affecting the 
emotional sensibilities alone. But this, and much else 
by which morality and religion were kept apart, belong 
to the evolutions of late ages. The traces of an under- 
lying current of belief in something greatly more spiritual 
than the Zeus of his poetical mythology, is apparent in 
many allusions ; though too frequently this supreme om- 
nipresence seemed to the Greek only an omnipotent, un- 
approachable, inexorable fate : ruler over gods and men, 
destined survivor of Olympus even more than of earth ; 
or as Caliban, in the dim searchings after a great First 
Cause, which belong to his later metaphysical stage, 
defines it — ' the something over Setebos.' For, as he 
reasons,— 

'There may be something quiet o'er His head, 
Out of His reach, that feels nor joy nor grief, 
Since both derive from weakness in some way. 
I joy because the quails come ; would not joy 
Could I bring quails here when I have a mind : 
This Quiet, all it hath a mind to, doth. 
'Esteemeth stars the outposts of its couch. 
But never spends much thought nor care that way. 
It may look up, work up,— the worse for those 
It works on ! 'Careth but for Setebos 



CALIBAN, THE MRTAFHYSICIAN. 



The many handed as a cuttle-fish, 

Who, making Himself feared through what He does, 

Looks up, first, and perceives He cannot soar 

To what is quiet and hath happy life ; 

Next looks down here, and out of very spite 

Makes this a bauble-world to ape yon real, 

These good things to match those as hips do grapes. 

'Tis solace making baubles, ay, and sport.' 

For Caliban himself lately peeping, eyed Prospero at 
his magic books ; and, vexed at the sight, stitched him- 
self a make-believe magic book of leaves, scrawled 
thereon meaningless characters, portentous enough ac- 
cording to his wish ; peeled for himself a wand, robed 
himself in skin of spotted oncelot, and tried to fancy 
himself Prospero. He has his tamed sleek ounce, which 
he makes cower, crouch, and mind his eye ; he keeps 
his Ariel too, a tall pouch-bill crane, which at his 
word will go wade for fish and straight disgorge ; and, 
to complete this realisation of being himself a lordly 
Prospero, he has got 

' Also a sea-beast, lumpish, which he snared, 
Blinded the eyes of, and brought somewhat tame, 
And split its toe-webs, and now pens the drudge 
In a hole o' the rock, and calls him Caliban ; 
A bitter heart, that bides its time and bites. 
'Plays thus at being Prosper in a way.' 

In many respects he seems to see a likeness to his own 
ways in the doings of the invisible power Setebos, or 
the something over Setebos. But, alas ! if He has any 
favouring leanings, they are not towards him. 

' He is terrible : watch His feats in proof ! 
One hurricane will spoil six good months' hope. 
He hath a spite against me, that I know, 
Just as he favours Prosper, who knows why? 
So it is, all the same, as well I find. 
'Wove wattles half the winter, fenced them firm 
With stone and stake, to stop she-tortoises 
Crawling to lay their eggs here: well, one wave, 



CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN. 



Feeling the foot of Him upon its neck, 

Gaped as a snake does, lolled out its large tongue, 

And licked the whole labour flat: so much for spite. 

'Dug up a newt He may have envied once 

And turned to stone, shut up inside a stone. 

Please Him, and hinder this? — "What Prosper does? 

Aha, if He would tell me how ! Not He ! ' 

So Caliban proceeds, reasoning in his obscure, con- 
fused way : not, however, as Shakespeare's, but wholly as 
Browning's Caliban. For he is no longer the interme- 
diate, half-brute, missing link ' that wants discourse of 
reason,' but the human savage, grovelling before the 
Manitou of his own conception ; betaking himself even 
to burnt sacrifices to appease this unseen Setebos, 
and ward off His envy, hoping the while that, some 
day, that other than Setebos may conquer Him ; or, 
likelier still, that He may grow decrepit, doze, and 
die. But at this stage the clouds gather, the wind 
rises to a hurricane, 

' Crickets stop hissing ; not a bird — or, yes, 
There scuds His raven that hath told Him all ! 
It was fool's play, this prattling! Ha! The wind 
Shoulders the pillared dust, death's house o' the move, 
And fast invading fires begin! White blaze — 
A tree's head snaps — and there, there, there, there, there, 
His thunder follows ! Fool, to gibe at Him.' 

Like the old Indian of Lake Superior, he hears the 
voice of God only in the violence and the terrors of 
nature ; and, like the first conscious offenders, when 
they heard, not the tempest and the whirlwind, but 
the still small voice among the trees of the garden, 
he is afraid. The evolution is, in truth, altogether 
too complete. This is no partially- developed irra- 
tional anthropoid, but man as he is to be met with 
in many a stage of mental progression far above the 
rude savage. 



CHAPTER VII. 

CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN. 

' How perplext 

Grows belief! 
Well, this clay-cold clod 

Was man's heart. 
Crumble it — and what comes next ? 

Is it God?' — Browning. 

ONE more idea, very foreign to anything pertaining 
to the brute-mind, presents itself, in modified evo- 
lution, to the Caliban of the later poet. Shakespeare's 
Caliban has his conception of death in its purely de- 
structive form ; but not greatly differing, except in its 
definiteness, from that of the ravening beast. When 
Trinculo mocks him, he proposes at once that .Stephano 
shall ' bite him to death ;' and when, in answer to the 
question 'Wilt thou destroy him, then?' Stephano pro- 
mises, on his honour, that the tyrant Prospero shall be 
brained, Caliban is transported with joy. But in all this 
death is no more to him than to the wolf or the tiger, 
when it wrathfully makes an end of its foe, though the 
desire for it has something of the human in its treasured 
craving for revenge. 

A dog is very capable of just such hatred, under 
similar provocation ; and its revenge, if unchecked, 
will not stop short of death. But the metaphysical 
island-monster of the modern poet gets greatly nearer 
to civilised humanity in his reasonings on the mystery 
of death. He does not indeed clearly realise the 



CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN. 



universality of this inevitable fate. For, looking on 
Setebos as a being not only terrible, but malevolent ; 
as a favourer of Prospero, and having a spite at him- 
self: he wistfully longs that it were possible to learn 
how to propitiate this implacable power, or get beyond 
his reach : — 

' Discover how, or die ! 
All need not die, for of the things o' the isle 
Some flee afar, some dive, some run up trees ; 
Those at His mercy, — why they please Him most 
When . . when . . well, never try the same way twice! 
Repeat what act has pleased, He may grow wroth, 
You must not know His ways, and play Him off, 
Sure of the issue. 'Doth the like himself: 
'Spareth a squirrel that it nothing fears, 
But steals the nut from underneath my thumb, 
And when I threat, bites stoutly in defence ; 
'Spareth an urchin that, contrariwise, 
Cm-Is up into a ball, pretending death 
For fright at my approach : the two ways please. 
But what would move my choler more than this, 
That either creature counted on its life 
To-morrow and next day, and all days to come, 
Saying, forsooth, in the inmost of its heart, 
"Because he did so yesterday with me, 
And otherwise with such another brute, 
So must he do henceforth and always." — Ay? 
'Would teach the reasoning couple what " must " means ! 
'Doth as he likes, or wherefore Lord? So He.' 

Caliban is thus, in this little island-world — over which, 
but for Prospero, he would be absolute lord, pos- 
sessed of dominion over every living thing, — the 
conscious embodiment of an omnipotence unchecked 
by any beneficent attribute ; and he realises accord- 
ingly how terrible such a God is, when he conceives 
of himself as subject to just such power, Setebos or 
other. He can himself crush out the life of the 
squirrel or urchin, whenever it pleases him to do so ; 
and it causes him no compunction that they ' are as 
I 2 



u6 CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN. 

water spilt upon the ground, which cannot be gathered 
up again.' He does according to his will with all 
beneath him, reckless and unsympathetic as a blind 
remorseless fate. But if it please him to spare, then 
he sees nothing to prevent perpetual life. Life, in 
fact, is less of a mystery than death, except when pro- 
duced by violence : as at his own pleasure it often is. 
' All need not die ;' in fact, only a few are actually 
brought within his own reach. But it is himself, not 
them, he cares for ; and for himself the outlook is 
gloomy enough, since the Setebos, his sole providence, 
is altogether such a one as himself — excepting only 
in this terrible absolutism of power : and so he 

' Conceiveth all things will continue thus, 
And we shall have to live in fear of Him 
So long as He lives, keeps His strength : no change, 
If He have clone His best, make no new world 
To please Him more, so leave off watching this, — 
If He surprise not even the Quiet's self 
Some strange day, — or, suppose, grow into it 
As grubs grow butterflies : else, here are we, 
And there is He, and nowhere help at all.' 

Here it must be confessed that Caliban, as the 
mere anthropoid, the brute-progenitor of man, and 
therefore the inferior of the lowest savage, is terribly 
out of his depth ; for, indeed, the poet-resuscitator 
has revivified him for wholly different purposes than his 
first creator had in view. There is something of the 
inconsequential simplicity that might be conceived of 
in the deductions of the irrational being in such rea- 
soning as this : — 

' All need not die, for of the things o' the isle 
Some flee afar, some dive, some run up trees ; ' 

and so there may be some way for us, too, to escape 
out of reach of Setebos. Yet the reasoning is prob- 
ably less simple than that of many a savage philosopher 



CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN. 



of modern Pacific islands. Get beyond reach of this 
terrible Setebos by such very simple processes as the 
urchin or the squirrel at times eludes himself, or as 
those of strongest wing flee afar, escaping altogether 
from that island-microcosm which is the only world 
he knows of outside of the moon : this — or else 
things as they are ; for so far as he can see, all 
things remain, and will continue so. 

The parable of the poet is not of difficult inter- 
pretation. The island and its puzzled philosopher 
deal with a condition of things in which the latest 
products of evolution have a personal interest, and 
from which reasoners of strongest flight have failed 
to effect their escape. This little island-world of ours, 
between the two illimitable oceans of an unbeginning 
and unending time, seems very unchangeable to the 
view of its ephemeron. He can conceive of no apter 
figure of stability than the everlasting hills. ' Since 
our fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they 
were from the beginning :' so reasons he. But it 
lies in the nature of things that reasoning beings 
learn to accumulate experience, to add what our 
fathers observed before they ' fell asleep' to what we 
ourselves perceive : and we begin to realise the fact 
that the hills are no more everlasting than the clouds or 
the waves. At the bottom of the ocean lie the moun- 
tains of former ages ; on the summits of our Andes 
and Himalayas are the sands of ancient ocean-beds ; 
and the mummied Pharaohs that ruled over ichthian 
or saurian worlds, when the foundations of those 
pyramids were laid, lie sepulchred there in the rocky 
matrix, like the island-newt that Setebos envied once, 
and turned to stone. But all this necessarily lies out- 
side of Caliban's philosophy. He is no link in a 



CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN. 



chain of accumulated knowledge and experience, what- 
ever other link he may supply : and so he can but 
reason from what he knows. 

Time is the grand factor in all theories of progressive 
change or evolution. The universe is but an aggre- 
gate of elements assuming ever new forms, in endless 
but not lawless change. But for the reign of law, 
indeed, there would seem to some to be no con- 
trolling or overruling power. And yet the idea of 
law without lawgiver or administrator, is one of those 
legal fictions requiring something vastly beyond the 
rationality of a Caliban to conceive. This, however, is 
certain, that the grand revolutions in physical geo- 
graphy which reveal themselves by such manifest 
chroniclings of process and result, are, for the most 
part, no more than the products of forces still at 
work. This is the key-note of modern geology ; and 
not less so of the newer anthropology. Given a 
cumulative change — depression or elevation, degrada- 
tion or evolution, — no matter how slight, how slow, 
how nearly imperceptible it may seem : if the one 
element of time be unlimited, it will suffice to rebuild 
a cosmos out of chaos, to stop the clock-work of the 
universe, or reorganise the heavens under conditions 
wholly new. But the change must be continuously 
progressive. A mere pendulum-motion, an ever-com- 
pensating ebb and flow, can lead to no gradual un- 
folding or maturing, but only to stability as the pro- 
duct of ceaseless change. The geologist has his one 
planet, ever changing, on which 

' The giant ages heave the hill 
And break the shore, and evermore 
Make, and break, and work their will.' 

To the naturalist, race is a unit, on which he was 



CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN. n 9 

long content to trace the influences of time and change. 
But now his aggressive philosophy would comprehend 
the whole living catena, from the protozoic dawn till 
yesterday, as one ever-lengthening but unbroken chain. 
The death of countless units is no more than the 
counterpart to the ceaseless displacements and replace- 
ments which result from the vital actions of our own 
organism, and which are for it, not death but life : 
an indispensable part of the process of vital evolution. 
That which is unsuitable or injurious must be elimin- 
ated. The survival of the fittest can only be accom- 
plished by the eradication of the inferior, the defective, 
or retrogressive. This useful process is death's work. 
Of this progressive elimination and evolution, whereby 
the greatest things are shown as the product of the 
least, man is the latest result ; the highest modification 
of pre-existent forms as yet developed ; the summit of 
the organic scale. He has risen to this lofty station 
through all the intermediate grades, from the very 
lowest. The higher he traces his pedigree, the lower 
must he be content to descend in recognising his 
original ancestry. 

But even if Caliban could have accomplished his 
very natural desire, and ' peopled the isle with Calibans,' 
his individual happiness, the experiences which were 
to constitute his own life, would' assume preeminent 
importance to him. Man may possibly learn to feel 
some pride at the idea of having risen, by processes of 
sexual selection, development, and evolution, to the 
summit of all organic life, instead of having been 
originally created its supreme lord. He may even 
accept ungrudgingly'the idea of that higher destiny of 
a distant future which will prove him to be no more 
than the transitional link in a process destined to beget 



CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN. 



a being to which he shall be no more than the Caliban 
of our human ideal. Yet still, when we shall have 
learned to recognise that death and life, working to- 
gether, carry onwards the race to all highest conceivable 
perfectibilities, our personal interests are all concentrated 
in our own entity. That unit is all in all to us, however 
insignificant it may be to nature. Death may play its 
useful part, no less than life, in working out the grandest 
ideal of an unending chain of being, over which the 
Divine Mind is recognised brooding in calm supremacy, 
and watching the evolution of the creative plan. But 
the little link which constitutes our own life is worth to 
us all the rest ; and philosophy cannot rob death of its 
terrors, whatever religion may do. 

' The sense of death is most in apprehension ; 
And the poor beetle that we tread upon, 
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great 
As when a giant dies.' 

One summer serves alike for the butterfly and the blade 
of grass. The oak lives a thousand summers in its 
term. Three score and ten years is the allotted life of 
man. But sooner or later death comes to all. The 
organic being perishes. It is resolved into its elements. 
It has ceased to be. But man, alone of all living 
creatures, anticipates, hopes, or fears death. All others 
escape that worse death which lies in its apprehension. 
Few things are more calculated to illustrate the contrast 
between the seemingly unprogressive, unaccumulating 
instincts of the lower animals, and that experience which 
is the product of human reason, than the sight of the 
herd or the sheep-flock driven to the shambles : vic- 
tims of that cruel necessity of our nature which, more 
than anything else, allies man to the brute. They go 
unconsciously as to the pasture field ; and yet for six 
thousand years, — or, according to some reckonings, pos- 



CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN. 



sibly for sixty thousand years, — the ox has been driven 
to the shambles, and the lamb led to the slaughtering, 
with no more warning to the survivors than reaches 
ourselves from ' the undiscovered country from whose 
bourn no traveller returns.' When the Duke, in ' Measure 
for Measure,' plays the monitor to Claudio, disguised 
as a friar, he urges this plea for the vanity of life : — 

' The best of rest is sleep, 
And that thou oft provokest ; yet grossly fear'st 
Thy death, which is no more. Thou art not thyself; 
For thou exist'st on many a thousand grains 
That issue out of dust. Happy thou art not ; 
For what thou hast not, still thou strivest to get, 
And what thou hast forget'st. Thou art not certain ; 
For thy complexion shifts to strange effects, 
After the moon. If thou art rich, thou'rt poor; 
For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows, 
Thou bear'st thy heavy riches but a journey, 
And death unloads thee.' 

But. the puzzling thing is, that man, in every stage of 
his evolution, dreads death ' that makes these odds all 
even ;' and yet defies it with a faith in something that 
lies beyond. The author of ' The Origin of Civilisation' 
puts, indeed, the savage's view of it in this light : ' Far 
from having realised to themselves the idea of a future 
life, they have not even learnt that death is the natural 
end of this. We find a very general conviction among 
savages that there is no such thing as natural death.' 
To die by a wound is an obvious and explicable ending 
of life ; though even in this case death is by means 
universally acquiesced in as a natural result, still less 
as an ending in the sense of absolute annihilation. But 
to die what we customarily term a natural death, seems 
to the savage mind contrary alike . to reason and to 
nature. A violent death is comprehensible. It is as 
though the crank of your steam-engine were smashed, 



CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN. 



or a hole rent in its boiler by some Armstrong or 
Whitworth bolt : and so the machinery must needs stop, 
and the life die out of it. But that, with crank whole, 
furnace bright, and boiler sound, the engine should 
suddenly stop, and defy all efforts to set it going again, 
is something akin to the idea which the savage realises 
of death in its most ordinary forms. To die by such 
obvious causes as a cleft skull, or a vital spear-thrust, 
is to die a natural death. To die by disease is, accord- 
ing to savage reasoning, to die by magic, a victim to the 
sorceries of some malignant foe. 

So far this is death, according to the savage idea of 
it. The light has been quenched which no alchemy of 
his can relume. And it is so easy to put out the light ! 
Caliban himself, in the mere wantonness of irresponsible 
power, sees 

' Yonder two flies, with purple films and pink, 
Bask on the pompion-bell above : kills both.' 

But, however effected, ' if 'twere done when 'tis done,' 
it would less matter. But the savage has no belief in 
annihilation. He buries his dead out of sight ; burns 
the body to ashes ; turns it adrift on the ocean ; scaffolds 
it on bier, or in canoe, till the bleached bones alone are 
left ; even feasts on it, or in other strangest ways 
disposes of the body. But the essential individuality 
that animated that body has not perished. He real- 
ises, in whatever crude fashion, the unseen presence of 
something which has survived the body, yet retains 
all its old personality. He anticipates or dreads its 
activity, as of one still existing, though no longer cog- 
nisant to bodily sense under the changed conditions 
of its new life. Even Shakespeare, with all his marvel- 
lous objective and creative power, wrought his super- 
natural beings on models familiar to him in nature. 



CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN. 



When Sir Humphrey Davy took to peopling the planets 
with ideal life, the creations of his fancy proved to be 
mere monstrosities of the naturalist. No wonder then 
that the idea which the savage realises of the world of 
spirits is crude and base. The details are of his own 
fashioning ; but not so the belief in a life beyond the 
grave. This appears to be an instinct of his moral 
nature. 

The savage of North Australia will not go near the 
graves of the tribe at night or alone. So far the same 
might be said of the peasantry of the most civilised 
nations of Christendom. But when the Australian 
savage must needs pass the graves of the tribe, Keppel 
tells us that he carries a fire-stick ' to keep off the spirit 
of darkness.' It should rather, probably, be said, to 
keep off the spirits : for darkness is everywhere, and 
at all times, a bugbear to the child, as to the savage ; 
though the grave-yard gives to it an added horror. 

This belief in the supernatural seems very natural to 
man. It requires no effort in the savage mind to dis- 
sociate the ideal ego from ' this muddy vesture of decay,' 
and to recognise the essential individuality as a thing 
apart. The materialistic creed belongs to a very dif- 
ferent speculative stage of evolution. Belief in the 
supernatural, in any sense, seems to be the supreme 
difficulty in our own day, as it has been that of other 
eras of speculative research. But doubt is not neces- 
sarily ' devil-born.' There lives much faith in honest 
doubt : far more, indeed, than in mere unreasoning 
credulity. ' Let knowledge grow from more to more ' : 
true faith has nothing to fear from that. There is no 
more suggestive passage in all the ingenious thought 
and accumulated research embodied in Mr. Darwin's 
' Descent of Man,' than that in which he reflects on such 



124 CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN. 

perplexing problems as are involved in the relapsing 
of dominant historic races; or, again, in such awakenings 
as that of Europe from the Dark Ages. ' At this early 
period almost all the men of a gentle nature, those given 
to meditation or culture of the mind, had no refuge 
except in the bosom of the Church, which demanded 
celibacy ; and this could hardly fail to have had a de- 
teriorating influence on each successive generation. 
During this same period the Holy Inquisition selected 
with extreme care the freest and boldest men in order 
to burn or imprison them. In Spain alone some of the 
best men, those who doubted and questioned — and 
without doubting there can be no progress, — were 
eliminated during three centuries at the rate of a 
thousand a year. The evil which the Church thus 
effected, though no doubt counterbalanced to a cer- 
tain, perhaps large extent in other ways, is incal- 
culable.' 

Mr. Darwin has expressed very clearly the impression 
forced on his mind as the result of close intercourse 
with typical representatives of widely-different savage 
races, of many traits of character showing how similar 
their minds are to our own. He traces a community of 
arts, implements, &c, not to traditions derived from any 
common progenitor, but to similarity in mental faculties. 
The same observation is applicable to various simple 
beliefs and customs, to modes of burial and choice of 
places of sepulture ; and as naturalists, when they ob- 
serve a close agreement in habits, tastes, and dispositions, 
between two or more domestic races, trace them to a 
common progenitor similarly endowed, so, says Mr. 
Darwin, ' the same argument may be applied with much 
force to the races of man.' The way in which he does 
apply it, is, of course, in harmony with his own hypo- 



CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN. 



thesis of evolution and descent, and need not now tempt 
us to discussion. It is the unity of mind, linking the rude 
savage and the Christian philosopher in a faith in the 
supernatural, and the conviction of a life beyond the 
grave, to which reference is now made. It requires no 
effort on the part of the savage to believe this. Faith 
with him is not an act of the mind. It is a state of the 
mind, from which he cannot emancipate himself if he 
would. And so, wherever civilised Europeans have 
found their way for the first time to new continents 
or isolated island-worlds, the idea has manifested itself 
that they were visitors from the world of spirits ; if 
not the native dead returned anew from beyond the 
grave. 

The belief that there is ' no resurrection, neither angel 
nor spirit,' is the work of the Sadducees of civilisation 
in its decline. It reappears from time to time, not 
merely as the evolution of scepticism, but as the 
natural concomitant and counterpart of feverish cre- 
dulity, the hot and cold fits of the same unhealthy 
moral condition. Man, in the unsophisticated stages of 
savage life — whether that be one of degradation, or only 
the lowest round of the ascending ladder of human 
evolution, — seems to find a doctrine of annihilation 
among the hardest things to believe. The American 
Indian, like the prehistoric races of Britain's cairns and 
barrows, provides food and weapons for his dead, where- 
with to begin the new life on which they are enter- 
ing. He hears their spirits in the winds as they moan 
among the trees, and listens for their voices in all the 
sounds of nature. According to his obscure conceptions 
of the disembodied spirit, it long haunts its old life- 
scenes, lingering around them, reluctant to depart. In 
its very crudest form, this belief in a life distinct from 



CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN. 



bodily existence, is something utterly inconceivable in 
relation to the brute mind. 

But there is another idea, very familiar to the human 
mind in widely diverse stages of civilisation, and that is 
a realisation, in some sort, of the emancipated spirit, as, 
by its deliverance from the bonds of the flesh, released 
from all absolute restrictions in relation to space, and 
consequently present to the object of its affections, 
however remote the scene of death and the place of the 
body's rest may be. This idea is curiously indicated 
in one of the scenes of ' The Tempest.' Ferdinand, in 
astonishment at hearing his own Italian tongue uttered 
by the fair vision of the island maiden, exclaims to 
Miranda— 

' My language ! heavens ! — 
I am the best of them .that speak this speech, 
Were I but where 'tis spoken.' 

Whereupon Prospero interposes, with this challenge — 

' How ! the best ? 
What wert thou, if the King of Naples heard thee ? ' 

And Ferdinand, whose belief in the death, not only of 
his father, but of the whole passengers and crew, is 
absolute, replies — 

'A single thing, as I am now, that wonders 
To hear thee speak of Naples. He does hear me; 
And that he does I weep : myself am Naples ; 
Who with mine eyes, never since at ebb, beheld 
The king my father wreck'd.' 

The fact that his father is drowned involves, as it were 
of necessity, that his spirit must be present and hear 
these utterances ; unless we interpret him in matter- 
of-fact literalness, as meaning no more than that he, 
being now king, hears himself speak. It is an idea 
dwelt on, in its purest and most elevated form, in the 
'In Memoriam' of Tennyson ; as where he asks — 



C A LIB AX, THE THEOLOGIAX. 



' Do we indeed desire the dead 

Should still be near us, at our side? 
Is there no baseness we would hide? 
Xo inner vileness that we dread? 

Shall he for whose applause I strove, 
I had such reverence for his blame, 
See with clear eyes some hidden shame, 

And I be lessen'd in his love? 

I wrong the grave with fears untrue : 
Shall love be blamed for want of faith? 
There must be wisdom with great Death; 

The dead shall look me through and through. 

Be near us when we climb or fall: 

Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours 

With larger, other eyes than ours, 
To make allowance for us all.' 

So the poet shapes into noblest forms fancies which are 
no less present to the most prosaic minds ; and then, 
glancing at the seeming strife between God and Nature 
in the modern expositions of science, he pauses over 
Nature's fancied response : — 

' I bring to life, I bring to death, 
The spirit does but mean the breath; 
I know no more ! ' 

But it is only to turn anew to the sure hope, and wait 
for answer and redress ' behind the veil.' In this way 
the loftiest ideas of the imaginative poet only expand 
the undefined conceptions of a spiritual life, the in- 
stinctive yearnings after immortality, of the rudest 
savage mind. To the evolutionist, however, this is no 
innate, much less a divinely-prompted instinct, peculiar 
to man, as a being made in the Divine image and 
endowed with a living soul : but only one of the latest 
phases in that continuous progression from the very 
lowest stages of mere vitality, which seems to him so 
easy of demonstration. To him the long vista shines 



CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN. 



with light, and the development of each successive step, 
from the first dawn of embryo life — if not, indeed, from 
inorganic matter, — is clear ; and it may be well here to 
glance at the process, as it reveals itself to him. ' There 
is no evidence,' says Mr. Darwin, ' that man was aborigi- 
nally endowed with the ennobling belief in the existence 
of an omnipotent God. On the contrary, there is ample 
evidence, derived not from hasty travellers, but from 
men who have long resided with savages, that numerous 
races have existed, and still exist, who have no idea of 
one or more gods, and who have no words in their 
languages to express such an idea. The question is, 
of course, wholly distinct from that higher one, whether 
there exists a Creator and Ruler of the universe ; and 
this has been answered in the affirmative by the highest 
intellects that have ever lived. If, however, we include 
under the name " religion " the belief in unseen or 
spiritual agencies, the case is wholly different ; for this 
belief seems to be almost universal with the less civilised 
races.' But, on the hypothesis of evolution, there is no 
difficulty in comprehending how this arose. The facul- 
ties of imagination, wonder, and curiosity, along with 
the first germ of reason, are all successive results of 
development ; and the rational stage at length reached, 
by whatever process, it is not unreasonable to assume 
that the being — now become man, — would naturally 
crave to understand what was passing around him, and 
speculate on his own existence. He would, in fact, 
prove himself to be man by looking before and after ; 
by asking Whence ? and Whither ? 

That dreams may have first suggested the idea of 
spirits to the savage mind, is the. theory most favoured 
as accounting for this indisputable universality of a 
faith in the supernatural ; and to this Mr. Herbert 



CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN. 



Spencer inclines to trace the earliest conception by 
man of his own dual nature, as a being at once cor- 
poreal and spiritual. But if man be in reality such a 
double essence, it would be strange that he should be 
utterly unconscious of that spiritual part of himself 
by which such consciousness is tested and appreciated. 
As to the visions of the night, they have their own 
unsolved mysteries ; and very different theories as to 
their origin will depend on our faith in an actual human 
soul, or in a mere vital brain-force as an evolution of the 
living organism, and our intellect as the brute instinct 
developed into the self-conscious stage. The shapings 
of man's waking beliefs seem, on the latter theory, to 
be little less the mere defining of shadowy fancies, than 
the subjective impressions of his sleep. We may surely 
ask for an indisputable theory, comprehensive enough for 
the whole phenomena of dreams, before accepting what 
is assumed to be no more than a misinterpretation of 
cerebral impressions and sensations, as the source of 
man's faith in the spiritual world, and so of his religion 
and belief in a God. Some at least of the mental 
phenomena which dreams reveal by no means militate 
against the long-cherished faith in the soul as the 
body's guest : not a mere impersonation of brain- 
work, but the living worker alike through hand and 
brain, and which shall continue its being, and attain 
to a higher life, when hand and brain have alike re- 
turned to the elements, or become transformed into 
other organisms. 

In this, as in other relations, time has done its work 
on the Caliban of the poet's creation, as on other 
entities. The Caliban of that first stage of evolution 
which offers itself for our study in ' The Tempest,' had, 
indeed, his dreams begot of the island harmonies, that 
K 



CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN. 



gave delight and harmed not ; soothed to sweetest sleep, 
and opened up to him such wealth of wonderland that 
when he waked he cried to dream again. These, how- 
ever, belong to the enchantments wrought by Ariel's 
pipe and tabor, and took their shape accordingly : 
though the natural and supernatural intermingle so 
harmoniously in Shakespeare's art, that nothing seems 
to us strange there, any more than in our own dreams. 
They play their part accordingly, as the most naturally- 
begotten dreams might do, in helping us to realise the 
transitional characteristics of the strange being wrought 
by the poet's fancy in that pregnant age. 

According to the promptings of his own limited 
desires, the Caliban of Shakespeare had no higher 
thought than to follow, dog-like, a better master than 
Prospero ; or, as most covetable of all conceivable real- 
isations, to roam at large, himself sole lord of nature 
in his little island-world. But even if, as some have 
fancied, ' The Tempest ' is the latest of all Shake- 
speare's works, the last ' heir of his invention ' ; some two 
and a half centuries have since transpired, and evolution 
has done its work on the strange islander of the poet's 
fancy. The Caliban of Browning is a very different 
being from Trinculo's 'very shallow monster.' As he 
lies there kicking his feet in the cool slush, as much at 
his ease as metaphysics will let him, and looks out 
across the sea, puzzling his brains about many things 
very incomprehensible to brains in such a merely tran- 
sitional stage of development, he comes upon the in- 
explicable problem of life and death ; for, unless, some 
strange day, Setebos, or that mysterious greater than 
Setebos, should change, he sees no chance of bettering. 
' Conceiveth all things will continue thus,' and having 
latterly, in his experiences with Prospero, found life hard 



CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN. 



enough, and the supernal powers only omnipotent,— by 
no means beneficent,— he 

' Believeth with the life the pain shall stop. 
His dam held different, that after death 
He both plagued enemies and feasted friends : 
Idly! He doeth His worst in this our life, 
Giving just respite lest we die through pain, 
Saving last pain for worst, — with which, an end. 
Meanwhile the best way to escape His ire 
Is not to seem too happy.' 

All which, as reasoning, may be apt enough for the 
later savage stage of evolution, with its apprehension of 
a last pain and worst, and its traditions of an untenable 
Sycorax-creed of future rewards and plagues ; but it 
by no means pertains to the true missing-link : man's 
assumed progenitor, in that transitional stage of evo- 
lution which Shakespeare so nearly realises for us. It 
is a stage of being which must be supposed, on any 
theory, to have endured for the briefest possible period, 
for it seems to place the half transmuted being in a 
condition of most unstable equilibrium, — too much of 
the brute for reasoning to do its part effectually ; too 
much of the being dependent on reason for the requisite 
brute means of offence and defence^ in that struggle for 
the survival of the fittest, on the results of which the 
calling of perfected humanity into existence was to 
depend. 

The great difficulty, as the originator of the whole 
theory and system of evolution admits, which presents 
itself to the recipients of it as a satisfactory answer to 
questionings concerning the origin of man, ' is the high 
standard of intellectual power and of moral disposition 
which he has attained. But every one who admits the 
general principle of evolution, must see that the mental 
powers of the higher animals, which are the same in 
K 2 



CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN. 



kind with those of mankind, though so different in 
degree, are capable of advancement. Thus the interval 
between the mental powers of one of the higher apes 
and of a fish, or between those of an ant and a scale- 
insect, is immense.' It is here taken for granted as 
certain to be admitted by all who accept the general 
principle of evolution, that the difference between the 
intellectual characteristics of man and the ape is only- 
one of degree, though few assumptions would seem to 
stand more in need of proof. But this being supposed 
to be granted, it is further noticeable that the mental 
faculties are variable in domesticated animals, and that 
the variations are inherited. The same transmission of 
inherited and progressive faculties through natural 
selection, is further assumed as conceivable in an ever- 
progressive scale ; and assuming, as before stated, that 
the difference between the intellectual powers of the do- 
mesticated animal and man is only one of degree, 
when at length they reached that stage which would 
constitute the endowments of what we ordinarily under- 
stand as a rational being, then the intellect must have 
been all-important to the animal, now become man, 
'enabling him to use language, to invent and make 
weapons, tools, traps, &c. ; by which means, in combi- 
nation with his social habits, he long ago became the 
most dominant of all living creatures.' As to the moral 
sense, that element which deals with motives, appeals to 
a standard of right and wrong, conceives the idea of re- 
tributive justice, responsibility, the immortality of the 
soul, and all the relations which link the human to the 
divine : that follows ' firstly, from the enduring and 
always present nature of the social instincts, in which 
respect man agrees with the lower animals ; and 
secondly, from his mental faculties being highly active, 



CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN 



and his impressions of past events extremely vivid, in 
which respects he differs from the lower animals.' 

The assumed instinctive belief in God has been 
affirmed to be universal in man, and so has been 
adduced as an unmistakable and absolute distinction 
between him and the lower animals. The capacity for 
such belief might be advanced with more force ; for it 
cannot be denied that the belief in the divine father- 
hood, which constitutes an essential element in the 
conception of God, apart from the beneficent teachings 
of Christianity, rarely has a place in the savage's theology. 
But a belief in the supernatural appears to be admittedly 
universal, however accounted for or explained away. In 
reality, however, if we must look for a special, innate and 
instinctive faculty in man, which may be advanced 
before all such distinctive attributes as tool-using, fire- 
making, cooking, reason, speech, and all else, I should 
select his belief in his own immortality : the ineradicable 
conviction of the existence of some essential element of 
being, which survives death and defies annihilation. It is 
an idea vaguely, crudely, childishly set forth in the 
beliefs of the rude Australian, Pacific islander, or Pata- 
gonian savage. But, account for it how we may, the 
rudest and most uncultured mind conceives of man 
as something more than a mere animated organisation ; 
realises the conception of the soul as distinct from, even 
while dwelling in that body, and capable of continued 
existence apart from it. It is indeed affirmed, in reply, 
that the barbarous races of man ' possess no clear belief 
in the immortality of the soul.' But slight reflection 
on the nature of the doctrine should suffice to indicate 
the natural distinction between any clear definition of 
such a faith, and the instinctive, ineradicable con- 
viction, in which is involved the belief that death does 



CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN. 



not annihilate the individual ; that wholly apart from 
that dead body the individuality of the deceased is still 
perpetuated and continues a conscious existence. 

As to clearly-defined beliefs on immortality, the nature 
and personality of God, or kindred subjects, outside of 
formulised creeds and rituals, how rare are they. The 
definition extorted from the uneducated man, as from 
the child, rarely mirrors, even in a remote degree, the 
belief it professes to embody. The mere attempt at 
definition dissipates the ideal, as the making of a graven 
image clouds the perception of an unseen God. Obtain, 
if you can, from ordinary intelligent civilised, men, apart 
from the formulae of creeds and catechisms, answers to 
such questions as, ' What is heaven, or the place of de- 
parted spirits ? Has it any relation to space ? Is it a 
locality ? What is the soul ? ' In some way or other they 
have been thinking of such matters all their lives, and 
yet the probability is that some will be shocked, and all 
will be puzzled by the demand. Or give them for text 
St. Paul's Corinthian questionings and definings : ' How 
are the dead raised up, and with what body do they 
come?' — with the exquisite analogies of the seed which 
can only quicken if it die. ' So also is the resurrection 
of the dead. It is sown in corruption, it is raised in 
incorruption ; it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in 
glory ; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power ; it 
is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body :' — 
words which have sounded to so many in all their myste- 
rious beauty and power, as with tearful eyes they have 
looked their last on the loved ones of earth, and heard 
those other words, ' earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust 
to dust.' 

As we return from thoughts so elevated and so 
solemn, to survey once more the kingdom of living 



CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAX. 



nature, and question it anew in relation to the novel but 
singularly suggestive problems which science is ad- 
vancing, all that is required of us is to admit what is 
thus assumed to be indisputable. We must see, as every 
one who admits the general principle of evolution does, 
'that the mental powers of the higher animals are the 
same in kind with those of mankind, though so different 
in degree.' We start in the course of reasoning which 
leads to the acceptance of the general principle referred 
to, with such an infinitesimal minimum of capacity as 
pertains to the Ascidian moluscoid, a mere sack adhering 
to the rocks of primeval seas. From this we trace, or 
assume, the gradual evolution of sensation, instinct, and 
all else, up to the mental powers of the highest irrational 
animal ; and then — while still acknowledging that the 
difference between the mind of the very lowest savage 
and that of the highest animal is enormous, — we are 
required to grant that this is a mere difference of degree. 
But why must this be granted ? It assuredly does not 
seem a self-evident proposition. When I compare the 
most wonderful evidence of canine intelligence with the 
every-day operations of the savage or the child, they 
seem to have such an essential difference between them, 
that I cannot conceive of the one changing into the other. 
They differ in kind : or if not, the proof is still wanting 
which shows them to be the same ; and surely the 
enormous difference acknowledged on all hands is not to 
be dismissed, as though it were one mere missing link in 
an otherwise continuous chain. At best there seems in 
the highest animals but a scanty minimum of intellectual 
power, and no adequate initiative for anything bearing 
even a shadowy resemblance to the moral elements of 
humanity, out of which to evolve the being only ' a 
little lower than the angels.' 



136 CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN. 

The transitional being vaguely dreamed of in the 
visions of elder travellers, — human after some imperfect 
fashion, yet not of the seed of Adam, — seems to task 
the genius of Shakespeare for its realisation ; and when 
clearly presented to us with his wondrous objective 
power, it is still but the highest evolution of the brute, 
and yet not without elements surpassing those of man's 
hypothetical brute- progenitor. To the modern evo- 
lutionist, however, no clear boundary-line is supposed 
to have separated the evolutionary anthropoid from 
the perfectly-developed man. ' Whether,' says Darwin, 
' primeval man, when he possessed very few arts of the 
rudest kind, and when his power of language was 
extremely imperfect, would have deserved to be called 
man, must depend on the definition we employ. In a 
series of forms graduating insensibly from some ape-like 
creature to man as he now exists, it would be impossible 
to fix on any definite points where the term "man" 
ought to be used. But this is a matter of very little 
importance.' Of very little importance ! And yet it 
takes for granted the grand step resulting, not in a mere 
gradation of form, but in a change so enormous as the 
transition from the irrational brute to rational man ; or, 
at the least, it assumes it to be an insensible graduation, 
easy, natural, inevitable : a mere bursting into flower 
of the ripened bud. 

Our modern poet, Robert Browning, undesignedly 
perhaps, but as becomes the true poet, mirroring the 
thought of his own age, — an age begot of the French 
and other revolutions ; by no means of the German 
reformation, — has carried his Caliban far beyond the 
irrational stage of being, into that of an advanced 
reasoning savage : if not, indeed, in some respects be- 
yond the highest point of definite reasoning in savage 



CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN. 



minds. Shakespeare, on the contrary, presents the ideal 
of highest brutish evolution, artificially or supernaturally 
endowed with the means of giving expression to its 
thoughts ; yet neither a man, nor any link in the possible 
pedigree of manhood : a fellow-being of the jay and the 
marmoset, of the spotted oncelot, the blind mole, and 
the crane. It is a true creation of genius ; wonderfully 
distinctive, consistent, and well-defined. 

In so far as the creative genius of the greatest of poets 
has thus conceived for us the ideal of the anthropo- 
morphoid, as far above the very highest known simiadse, 
as that falls short of man — ' endued with intellectual 
sense and soul,' — he has supplied a 'link more consistent 
with any conceivable evolution of which the anthropo- 
morpha are susceptible, than any ideal based on assumed 
stages of lowest degradation of savage man. But the 
lines of evolution of the anthropoid and the savage, 
according to such ideal, are parallels. They may admit 
of endless development, but they will not coalesce. 

Dryden grossly travestied the wonderful ideal, when 
he dared, with profane hands, to drag down the beauti- 
ful comedy of Shakespeare's mature genius to the 
impure standard of the Restoration^ stage ; yet even he 
was struck with wonder at the profound truthfulness of 
a creature of which nature furnished no type. Schlegel 
pronounces the conception to be one of inconceivable 
consistency and depth. Hazlitt, speaking of it as one of 
the wildest and most abstracted of all Shakespeare's 
impersonations, says : ' The character grows out of the 
soil where it is rooted, uncontrolled, uncouth and wild, 
uncramped by any of the meannesses of custom. It is 
of the earth, earthy. It seems almost to have been dug 
out of the ground, with a soul instinctively added to it, 
answering to its wants and origin.' Gervinus, in a too 



CALIBAN THE THEOLOGIAN. 



realistic interpretation of the offspring of the blear-eyed 
hag Sycorax, and still more of the wrathful hyperboles 
of Prospero, misses the full appreciation of this super- 
natural being, belonging to a wholly different order and 
genus from all the other varied conceptions of Shake- 
spearean genius. Yet he, too, has aptly characterised 
Caliban as an embryonic being, defiled, as it were, by 
his earthly origin from the womb of savage nature. 

The extreme contrast between the seventeenth and 
the nineteenth century's conception of the reasoning 
brute, with a brute-soul answering to its origin and 
desires, is most noticeable. Shakespeare's Caliban 
reasons throughout from the sheer animal point of view ; 
and his dam's god is a mere embodiment of power ; no 
object of faith or worship ; nor indeed a being with 
whom he claims to have any personal relations. There 
is no indication of belief in such unseen or spiritual 
agencies as is admittedly all but universal with the most 
degraded savages. We must, of course, except here the 
dramatic machinery, with Ariel and the spirits who 
bestow upon the eyes of the young lovers some vanity 
of Prospero's art ; and of whom he says presently — 

' Our revels now are ended. These our actors, 
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and 
Are melted into air, into thin air.' 

There is in the Caliban of Shakespeare no intellectual 
recognition of the supernatural, such as in Browning's 
Island Theologian makes him so essentially human. It 
is a distinction coinciding with what we re-affirm in 
relation to the present line of argument : that man in 
the very lowest stage of savage degradation does in 
so far recognise his immortal nature in the realisation, 
however vaguely, of some idea of the human soul as 
that which is the essence of the individual, and which 



CALIBAN THE THEOLOGIAN. 



survives the death of the body. To him the spirit 
means something wholly distinct from the breath ; and 
death is very definitely the separation of soul and body. 
This perception has all the appearance of an innate, 
instinctive self-consciousness. It involves the belief in 
a future life, and includes the germ of a faith in im- 
mortality. It is the original endowment on which the 
ennobling belief in an omnipotent, omniscient God, and 
the vitalising faith in a divine Redeemer, are to be in- 
grafted in the fulness of time. It is ' the substance of 
things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen ;' man's 
heritage as man ; and wanting which he would fitly 
rank with the beasts that perish. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



THE SUPERNATURAL. 



' A thousand fantasies 
Begin to throng into my memory 
Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire, 
And airy tongues that syllable men's names.' — Covins. 

THE belief in the supernatural, however it may be 
explained, or even be sought to be explained 
away, appears to be universal among mankind. In the 
discussions which it has elicited in special reference to 
the distinctive elements of humanity, the important 
distinction between actual beliefs and their definition 
has not always been kept in view. One of the difficulties 
assigned by Sir John Lubbock in arriving at any clear 
conception of the religious systems of strange races, is 
traced by him to ' a confusion between a belief in ghosts 
and that in an immortal spirit.' Captain Burton notes 
this nice distinction in reference to the negro, that he 
believes ' in a ghost, but not in spirit ; in a present 
immaterial, but not in a future ; ' and the essential 
diversity of the two opinions is accordingly assumed. 
' The spirit is not necessarily regarded as immortal 
because it does not perish with the body.' This seems 
an altogether artificial refinement, based on the dog- 
matic creeds and beliefs of comparatively modern 
centuries ; and in which the real significance of this 
admitted belief in a human spirit, or soul, absolutely 
distinct from the body, and capable of surviving it, is 
slighted if not entirely ignored. If the spirit is believed 



THE SUPER XA TURAL. 



to survive after death, then any idea of its subsequent 
mortality can only be of a negative kind, the mere 
result of the incapacity to grasp with any clearness the 
idea of life immortal. In this respect it may aptly 
enough compare with our ideas on the limitation or 
infinity of space. M. Louis Figuier, who has undertaken, 
in his ' Day after Death,' to solve the mysteries of a 
future life, defines God as the Infinite in spirit, and the 
universe as the Infinite in extent ; and then he locates 
this infinite God at the mathematical centre of the 
worlds which compose this infinite universe : which 
seems very much like undertaking to construct a circle 
which shall have no circumference, and yet finding for it 
a centre ! The old doctrine of Anaximander of Miletus, 
whereby he accounted for the suspension of the earth in 
the centre of the universe, was that, being equidistant 
from the containing heaven in every direction, there was 
no reason why it should move in one direction rather 
than another. Anaxagoras modified this doctrine, and 
was accused of atheism, because of the physical ex- 
planations he assigned to celestial phenomena. The 
speculations of philosophy during all the later centuries 
have not achieved a solution of the problem of limited 
or unlimited space. Our ideas on such subjects are apt 
to vanish in the effort at definition, like cloud-castles 
when we attempt to draw them. 

Religion and creed are by no means synonymous 
terms. The medieval controversies on the special nature 
and procession of the Holy Spirit, and the hopeless 
schism of the Eastern and Western Church represented 
by the single word Filioque, illustrate theological defini- 
tions forcing into concrete form such details of belief as 
no ordinary layman could define, or would probably 
recognise any necessity for defining, till challenged by the 



H2 THE SUPERNATURAL. 

exactions of ecclesiastical orthodoxy. The modern 
scientific inquirer is apt at times to be little less dog- 
matic in his demands for concrete forms of thought than 
the old theologian. Our elaborated and long-defined 
ideas of the human soul, a future state, life, immortality, 
and God, are not only placed alongside the crude, wholly 
undefined, instinctive beliefs of the savage as to the 
survival of the spirit or soul of man after death : but a 
logical consistency of detail is demanded in reference to 
opinions which have been accepted like any other intui- 
tive belief. So long as the savage recognises an immaterial 
spirit distinct from the body, surviving its dissolution, 
and perpetuating the personality and individuality iden- 
tified with it, the precise conception he forms as to the 
duration of this immaterial life is of secondary signi- 
ficance. Experience has nothing to teach him in 
reference to it. While the memory of the dead is fresh, 
the idea of the surviving spirit will be strongly impressed 
on the mind. But as the recollection of the deceased 
fades away, the conception of his immaterial life will grow 
correspondingly dim, until the two disappear together. 

The clearly-defined belief in the life and immortality 
of the Christian creed is due to the teachings of Christ 
Himself, and to the doctrine educed and taught by its 
first preachers, as the great lesson of the resurrection. 
Sir John Lubbock, after affirming that ' the belief in an 
universal, independent, and endless existence is confined 
to the highest races,' quotes, in confirmation of the 
absence of any belief in a future state, a reported en- 
deavour to enforce the acceptance of this doctrine on a 
savage. The instructor 'tried long and patiently to 
make a very intelligent docile Australian Black under- 
stand his existence without a body, but the Black never 
could keep his countenance, and generally made an 



THE SUPERNA TUKAL. 



excuse to get away. One day the teacher watched, and 
found that he went to have a hearty fit of laughter at 
the absurdity of the idea of a man living and going 
about without arms, legs, or mouth to eat. For a long 
time, he could not believe that the gentleman was serious, 
and when he did realise it, the more serious the teacher 
was the more ludicrous the whole affair appeared to the 
Black.' This narrative may perhaps fairly exhibit the 
actual condition of a savage mind to which the idea of 
life apart from bodily existence was absurd. But had 
the Australian been as subtle as Browning's Caliban, 
he might have appealed to good authority on ' the 
physical theory of another life,' and denied that the 
active existence of the soul is conceivable apart from 
some definite relation to space ; or he might have de- 
manded an explanation of St. Paul's statement concern- 
ing 'the spiritual body' of the resurrection. Possibly 
enough, however, the teacher presented ideas which, in 
the sense in which they were interpreted by the poor 
Australian, were wholly ludicrous ; while, all the time, 
he held to the belief of his people in an immaterial life 
after death. The Swedenborgian ideal of a future state 
is to some minds so gross as to excite ridicule. But 
their mirth, however unseemly, would be very falsely 
construed into laughter at the supposed absurdity of all 
belief in a life beyond the grave. There is only too apt 
a tendency to treat any incomprehensible faith as folly. 
The doctrine of transubstantiation, or the real presence, 
appears to thousands not only untenable, but absurd ; 
to thousands more its denial is blasphemy and sheer 
atheism. The scientific sceptic who laughs at spirit- 
rapping and other kindred follies, exposes himself to 
denunciation as an infidel materialist. In truth the 
actual beliefs of the majority of men scarcely admit of 



THE SUPERNATURAL. 



logical analysis; and the 'foolishness' of the belief in a 
future life is neither confined to savages, nor to modern 
discovery. 

In his poem of ' Cleon,' Browning has embodied, in 
the form of a letter from the Greek poet to his friend 
Protos, the longings of a pagan Greek of the first century 
for some revelation of that very immortality which, when 
presented as the doctrine of the resurrection, he rejects 
as folly. Reminded that he shall live as a poet, in the 
immortality of his verse, Cleon repels such consola- 
tion as a vain deception of mere words. As his soul 
becomes intensified in power and insight, the increasing 
weight of years warns him of life's close : — 

'When all my works wherein I prove my worth, 
Being present still to mock me in men's mouths, 
Alive still, in the phrase of such as thou, 
I— I, the feeling, thinking, acting man, 
The man who loved his life so over much, 
Shall sleep in my urn. It is so horrible, 
I dare at times imagine to my need 
Some future state revealed to us by Zeus, 
Unlimited in capability 
For joy, as this is in desire for joy, 
To seek which, the joy-hunger forces us. 
That, stung by straightness of our life made straight, 
On purpose to make sweet the life at large — 
Freed by the throbbing impulse we call death, 
We burst there as the worm into the fly, 
Who while a worm still, wants his wings. But, no! 
Zeus has not yet revealed it ; and alas ! 
He must have done so, were it possible ! ' 

But Cleon, having thus given utterance to the earnest 
longings of a vain desire, adds a postscript on some 
trivial matters. The messenger of his correspondent, as 
it seems, is the bearer of a letter from him to one called 
Paulus, a barbarian Jew, who has much to say about one 
' Christus ' and this very immortality of which the poet 



THE SUPERNATURAL. 145 

fain would learn. But with true Greek contempt for all 
beyond the Hellenic pale, he writes — 

' Thou canst not think a mere barbarian Jew, 
As Paulus proves to be. one circumcised, 
Hath access to a secret shut from us? 
Certain slaves 
Who touched on this same isle, preached him and Christ; 
And (as I gathered from a bystander) 
Their doctrines could be held by no sane man.' 

The search for defined or consistent creeds on such 
matters of inquiry and belief, among nations in widely 
differing stages of progress, is apt to prove illusory, and 
among savage races is vain and deceptive. We trans- 
mute their ideas in the alembic of our own creeds and 
opinions, and obtain results unconsciously adulterated 
by prejudice and misconception. We are trying in 
prosaic literalness to do what the poet Browning has 
done with the Caliban of Shakespeare : to enter as it 
were into his brain, and think his own thoughts, wholly 
unaffected by those of the actual thinker. It seems to me 
sufficient for all that is attempted to be deduced from 
such beliefs, that the rudest savage does realise the idea 
of man's spirit as something at least ethereal, capable of 
leaving the body, of existing apart from it, of haunting 
the deserted dwelling, or hovering round the grave. 
With a very vague conception of what is implied in the 
idea of immateriality, his belief in the invisible ghost or 
spirit does realise the essential ideas of an immaterial 
existence, a spiritual life with the personality perpetuated 
apart from the body, and surviving death. Whether 
that survival shall be regarded as temporary or eternal 
is much more a matter of definition of the instinctive 
belief, than essential to its universality or significance 
as one of the most characteristic attributes of human 
reason. 

L 



i 4 6 THE SUPERNATURAL. 

So soon as we reach the stage of minutely denned 
beliefs and formulated creeds, they prove to be full of 
inconsistencies ; and before the printing-press superseded 
tradition, and came provided with ready-made opinions 
for all, the interblendings of ecclesiastical dogma and 
popular folk-lore resulted in conceptions singularly 
quaint and even grotesque. The instinctive belief is 
one thing : the defined ideas, whether formulated into 
vulgar beliefs, or into written creeds, are of a wholly 
different nature. The medieval doctrine of purgatory, 
so curiously interwoven into Shakespeare's ' Hamlet,' is 
an illustration of the intermingling of those diverse 
elements ; and hence the strange extravagances which it 
involves. It had been adopted into the teachings of the 
early Church, had modified the whole prevailing ideas of 
a future life, and when developed by the opinions of 
successive generations, had been reduced to a dogmatic 
form by the teachings of centuries. This intermediate 
state of the soul accordingly affected the superstitions of 
thousands, long after it had ceased to be a part of their 
accepted creed. 

It is curious, for example, to turn to the current 
popular ballads of Presbyterian Scotland, and to note 
how ineradicable have been the impressions produced on 
the popular mind by the ancient faith, in spite of the 
vigorous crusade of ecclesiastical discipline and public 
opinion conjoined, for upwards of three centuries. Pasch, 
Yule, Halloween, Fasternseen, Rudeday, Whitsunday, 
Candlemas, and other rustic anniversaries, all survive as 
relics of the ancient faith; and are mostly commemorated 
still by an unpremeditated yet universal consent, accord- 
ing to the Old Style. Such a faithful popular tradition 
thus running counter alike to modern almanacs and creeds, 
has not unreasonably been advanced as confirmation of 



THE SUPERNATURAL. 147 

the authenticity of the ballad-poems in which the same 
ideas have been transmitted, mainly by oral tradition. 
But there also the supernatural beliefs of earlier gene- 
rations have proved no less tenacious than such eccle- 
siastical traditions. In ' Tamlane ' and ' True Thomas ' 
the apparition of the Queen of Elfland gives the special 
character to these old ballads. But the Scottish elves 
peopled the scaurs and dens of a wild country which for 
centuries had been the scene of bloody feud and violence, 
and reflect in their sombre hue the characteristics of 
their source. They were esteemed a capricious, irritable, 
and vindictive race, very different from the airy haunters 
of England's moonlit glades. The Scottish Elfin Queen 
is in part the embodiment of the same gloomy super- 
stitions which begot the witch-hags and other coarse 
imaginings of the national demonology. Nevertheless 
the Queen of Elfland and her mischievous elves are 
generally designated the Good People ; the canny pru- 
dence of the Scot leading him to apply fair words in the 
very naming of such testy and capricious sprites. Even 
in the indictments of ecclesiastical courts this is adhered 
to, as in that of Alison Pearson, convicted at St. An- 
drews, in 1586, of witchcraft, and consulting with evil 
spirits. She is charged with 'haunting and repairing 
with the gude neighbours and Queene of Elfland, thir 
divers years by-past, as she had confest;' and, among 
other things, she had been warned by one she met in 
Fairyland to ' sign herself that she be not taken 
away, for the teind of them are tane to hell everie 
year.' 

The Scottish Elfin Queen is, accordingly, a very dif- 
ferent character from the sportive Mab of Shakespeare's 
Mercutio, who gallops night by night over lawyers' 
fingers, courtiers' knees, and through lovers' brains ; and 
L 2 



148 THE SUPERNATURAL. 

only becomes ' the angry Mab ' when, as she drives o'er 
slumbering ladies' lips she finds ' their breaths with 
sweetmeats tainted are.' Still less does she resemble 
that ethereal Queen of Shadows, Titania, in the ' Mid- 
summer Night's Dream.' Her elfin court has indeed its 
deceptive pleasures, its glamour, and its green-wood 
revels ; but she and her elves are the vassals of Hell ; 
and in the fanciful ballad, as in the prosaic indictment 
for witchcraft, are described as paying their tithe, not 
annually indeed, but every seven years to the devil. 
Tamlane, for example, tells the Earl's daughter, who 
meets this wanderer from Fairyland ' among the leaves 
sae green ' — ■ 

' And never would I tire, Janet, 

In Fairyland to dwell; 
But aye, at every seven years, 

They pay the teind to hell; 
And I'm sae fat and fair of flesh, 

I fear 'twill be raysell.' 

The ballad of ' Tamlane ' is mentioned in the ' Com- 
playnt of Scotland,' printed at St. Andrews in 1549, and 
undoubtedly embodies the superstitions of a much 
earlier date. 

But it is more significant for our present purpose to 
see reflected in the early Scottish ballads the popular 
ideas of spirits, ghosts, and apparitions of the dead, 
haunting the scenes of their unexpiated crimes, or the 
grave where the murdered body had been laid. The 
resemblance between these ill-defined incongruous ideas, 
and some of those already referred to as characteristic of 
the savage conception of death and the departed spirit, 
is unmistakeable. But, besides the apparitions of the 
dead who can find no repose in the grave till expiation 
has been made for some deadly sin, or of the victim of 
crime whose unresting spirit wanders abroad, like that 



THE SUPERXATURAL. 



of the murdered Dane, demanding vengeance, there are 
characteristic types of national superstition : as where 
the dead are disquieted by the mourning of loving ones 
refusing to be comforted because they are not ; or again 
where rest is denied them till they recover their plighted 
troth. In ' The Wife of Usher's Well,' her three stout 
and stalwart sons, sent by her over the sea, are scarcely 
a week gone from her when she learns that they are 
drowned. In her agony at their loss, she prays that the 
winds may never again be still, nor the floods be calmed, 
till her sons return to her ' in earthly flesh and blood.' 
The dread prayer disturbs the rest of her sons, and the 
result is thus set forth in homely simplicity : — 

' It fell about the Martinmas, 

When nights are lang and mirk, 
The carline wife's three sons cam bame, 

And their hats were o' the birk. 
It neither grew in syke nor ditch, 

Nor yet in ony sheugh ; 
But at the gates o' Paradise, 

That birk grew fair eneugh.' 

And so the three drowned men remain, till the dawn 
approaches, with their mother tending on them in her 
short-lived joy, as seemingly her living sons restored to 
her. She lays them to rest with all a mother's tender 
care, wraps her mantle about them, and sitting down 
by their bedside, at length yields to sleep, ere the red- 
cock's crow warns them to begone. They cannot tarry 
longer from Paradise ; but their consideration for her 
is indicated with touching simplicity by their urging 
one another to linger to the latest moment on her ac- 
count : — 

' Up then crew the red red cock, 

And up and crew the gray; 

The eldest to the youngest said, 

" 'Tis time we were away; 



S50 THE SUPERNATURAL. 

The cock doth craw, the day doth daw, 

The channering worm doth chide; 
Gin we be miss'd out o' our place, 

A sair pain we maun bide." 

" Lie still, lie still but a little wee while, 

Lie still but if we may ; 
Gin my mother should miss us when she wakes, 

She'll gae mad ere it be day.'" 

In the confusion of ideas as shown in the birch 
gathered at the gates of Paradise, the penance dreaded 
in case of their absence being discovered, and the chiding 
of the grave's channering, or fretting worm, there are 
striking illustrations of the undefined blending of con- 
ceptions of an immaterial existence wholly apart from 
the body ; with the difficulty, as common to the mind 
of the English peasant as to that of the Australian 
savage, of conceiving any clear realisation of the dis- 
embodied spirit, or of death distinct from the 'wormy 
grave.' The same homely pathos and tenderness inter- 
mingle with a like confused interblending of the grave 
and the spiritual life, in ' Clerk Saunders,' ' William's 
Ghost,' and other Scottish ballads of this class. In 
both the dead are represented as reclaiming their faith 
and troth, without which they cannqt rest in their graves. 
In the former ballad, Clerk Saunders, a noble lover who 
had been slain in the arms of May Margaret, the JCing's 
daughter, returns after c a twelvemonth and a day,' and 
standing at her bower window an hour before the dawn, 
addresses her : — 

' Give me my faith and troth again, 
True love, as I gi'ed them to thee.' 

Before she will yield to his request, she insists on her 
lover coming within her bower and kissing her, though 
he warns her that his mouth is cold and smells of the 
grave. She questions him about the other world, and 



THE SUPERNA TURAL. 



especially of what comes of women ' who die in strong 
travailing.' He replies in the same simple style of 
homely pathos as in the ballad already quoted : — 

' Their beds are made in the heavens high, 

Down at the foot of our good Lord's knee, 
Weel set about wi' gillyflowers ; 

I wot sweet company for to see. 
O cocks are crowing a merry midnight, 

I wot the wild-fowl are boding day ; 
The psalms of heaven will soon be sung, 

And I ere now will be missed away.' 

May Margaret returns her lover's troth by a curiously 
literal process, thereby freeing the disembodied spirit of 
a tie which still bound it to earth, and then he leaves 
her with the tender assurance that 

' Gin ever the dead come for the quick. 
Be sure, Margaret, I'll come for thee.' 

But she follows the departing spirit without waiting to 
cover her naked feet ; and then there once more appears 
the same simple child-like confusion of ideas which 
makes the grave not merely the portal to the spirit-land, 
but the sole spirit-world : — 

' " Is there ony room at your head, Saunders ? 

Is there ony room at your feet? 
Or ony room at your side, Saunders, 

Where fain, fain, I wad sleep ? " 
"There's nae room at my head, Margaret, 

There 's nae room at my feet ; 
My bed it is full lowly now : 

Amang the hungry worms I sleep. 
" Cauld mould is my covering now, 

But, and my winding-sheet ; 
The dew it falls nae sooner down 

Then my resting-place is weet. 
" But plait a wand o' the bonnie birk, 

And lay it on my breast; 
And gae ye hame, May Margaret, 

And wish my saul gude rest." ' 



THE SUPERNATURAL. 



Such confused ideas of Paradise and Purgatory, of the 
world beyond the grave, the final resting-place of the 
soul, and that where the body lies decaying in its 
'wormy bed,' all illogically jumbled together without 
any conscious inconsistency, is of common occurrence 
in the early ballads. It represents the ideas of an age 
in which a belief in the immortality of the soul had 
been inculcated and inherited through many generations, 
and was entertained unquestioningly by all. Such em- 
bodiments of current popular thought may therefore 
be accepted as apt illustrations of how impossible it is 
to try by any standard of logical consistency the crude 
attempts of the savage mind to define its beliefs on the 
same subject. What shall we make — in view of such 
illogical opinions perpetuated for centuries in the most 
favourite popular forms, among a civilised Christian 
peasantry,— of such nice distinctions as that attempted 
to be drawn by Captain Burton, and quoted with highest 
approval, of the negro's belief in a ghost but not in a 
spirit ; in a present immaterial life, but not in a future 
one ? On evidence which seems far more indisputable 
than any definitions that he could possibly obtain of the 
negro's discriminating belief between ghosts and spirits, 
he may affirm that the Scottish peasantry of the six- 
teenth and seventeenth centuries believed that heaven 
and the grave were one and the same place. 

Were our aim here to illustrate in detail the pecu- 
liarities of Scottish superstition and the national fairy- 
lore, the Gyre-Carline, or Scottish Hecate, the Kelpie, 
the Shellycoat, the Wraith, the Brownie, or Billie Blin 
of the ballads, the Daoine Shie or Men of Peace, as the 
fairies of the Highlands are styled, and other cha- 
racteristic national fancies would come under review. 
But they are only referred to now in illustration of the 



THE SLTERXATURAL. 



mode in which such beliefs have been reduced to definite 
form in the traditions and popular rhymes handed down 
by the peasantry through many generations. 

To a great extent the belief in the supernatural, as 
far as Scotland is concerned, has been transmitted to us 
unmodified by the refinements of a more critical age. 
It is otherwise with the corresponding superstitions and 
folk-lore of England. There the creative imagination 
of a rare group of poets who adorned her sixteenth 
century, selected the elfin creed and the darker super- 
stitions of popular belief as material on which their 
fancy should work its will. Shakespeare especially made 
them his own ; and they have been transmuted into 
things of beauty which supersede the elves, witches, 
and lubber fiends that scared the old rustic hearth, and 
made darkness terrible. The Queen of Fairyland and 
all her elfin train are accordingly associated with the 
romantic epic of Spenser, and the elfin-dream of a 
midsummer's night to which Shakespeare has given 
enduring form. 

But the distinction between the visions of the two 
Elizabethan poets is great. The former is wholly the 
romancer, and we must be content with the enjoyment 
of his epic as a minstrel's tale. The dramas of Shake- 
speare, on the "contrary, present an inexhaustible vein 
of concrete philosophy ; though in a form so seductive 
that its profound wisdom is apt to elude the ordinary 
reader. They transmute some of the crudest incon- 
gruities of vulgar superstition into definite forms no less 
adapted for uses of pure science, than for the aesthetic 
requirements of the stage. They transform into ideal 
embodiments, available for all purposes of reasoning, 
fancies before intangible as the creed of the savage, 
which vanishes in the attempt to formulate it. 



THE SUPERNATURAL. 



The Caliban of Shakespeare, as we have seen, realises 
the ideal of a being intermediate between brute and 
man, defined out of the vague beliefs entertained re- 
garding the inhabitants of new-found lands in that six- 
teenth century. To the same conceptive genius we owe 
the no less definite realisations of popular folk-lore : the 
trafficker with Satanic powers, the communer with the 
dead, the disembodied intruder from the world of spirits, 
and the like impersonations of what formed the English 
counterpart to the superstitions embodied in early Scot- 
tish ballads. All this the most objective of poets accom- 
plished for us in an age wholly unaffected by ideas 
which now influence our conceptions of the immaterial 
and the supernatural ; and that in a way which renders 
them available for fresh inquisition into the innate ideas 
of the vulgar and the savage mind in relation to all that 
is supra-natural. 



CHAPTER IX. 

GHOSTS AND WITCHES. 

' Why, what should be the fear? 
I do not set my life at a pin's fee ; 
And for my soul, what can it do to that, 
Being a thing immortal as itself.' — Hamlet. 

THE ease with which Shakespeare sports at will in 
the purely ideal and supernatural world of his 
own fancy's creation, is only rendered less astonishing 
by that still greater marvel, the ease with which he 
moves amid the real world of humanity, compassing in 
exhaustless variety its every phase. Hence it is that 
we dwell, above all things, on the supreme naturalness 
of Shakespeare's dramatic art, his thorough truthfulness 
and verisimilitude, his ever-renewing modernness and 
universality. In a certain sense all this is simple enough, 
— simple as Hamlet's playing upon the pipe : ' Govern 
these ventages with your fingers and thumb, give it 
breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most elo- 
quent music' It is simple, since Jt springs from no 
mere transfixing of temporary fashions, either of dress 
or of thought, but is the impersonation of the human 
soul, its affections, its passions, its aspirations, its faith, 
hopes, and fears : things which can never grow old- 
fashioned or go out of date so long as humanity 
endures. 

Hamlet's directions to the players are completed 
'with this special observance, that they o'erstep not 
the modesty of nature ; for anything so overdone is 
from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the 
first and now, was and is, to hold as 'twere the mirror 



156 GHOSTS AND WIT CUES. 

up to nature ; to show virtue her own feature ; scorn 
his own image, and the very age and body of the time 
its form and pressure.' He is, indeed, only dictating 
the actor's part; yet in defining 'the purpose of playing,' 
he has in view also that of the dramatist ; and not less 
so when, protesting against the strut and rant of the 
player who oversteps the modesty of nature, he exclaims, 
' I had thought some of nature's journeymen had made 
men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity 
so abominably' It is from the lips of the wise Ulysses 
that we listen to the familiar aphorism, ' One touch of 
nature makes the whole world kin.' To this all Shake- 
speare's art is referred ; by this it is ever tested. 

' This to our blood is bom ; 
It is the show and seal of nature's truth.' 

But though Shakespeare never oversteps the modesty 
of nature, his genius has nowhere more strikingly ex- 
hibited its creative power than in his varied realisations 
of beings lying beyond the pale of humanity, and 
unfamiliar to all our experiences. The range in this 
respect is no less ample than the wondrous variety 
discernible in his delineations of men and women. They 
have moreover not only as distinct an individuality, but 
they have an equally impressive charm of verisimilitude. 
They startle us less by any repelling strangeness than 
his Shylock, Iago, Lady Macbeth, or Richard III. They 
are not the mere offspring of an exuberant fancy wan- 
toning in its wealth. Each has a purpose of its own, 
and plays its needful and altogether fitting part in 
relation both to the visible and spiritual world with 
which man traffics here. ' Macbeth ' has its witches — 

' So withered and so wild in their attire ; 
That look not like the inhabitants o' the earth, 
And yet are on't.' 



GHOSTS AND WITCHES. 



They are the visible promptings of criminal desires, 
impersonated as the witches of popular folk-lore, in an 
age when King James deemed his ' Daemonology' such 
an embodiment of wisdom that it was reprinted for the 
benefit of Shakespeare and his countrymen when that 
' wisest fool in Christendom ' succeeded to Elizabeth's 
throne. It was, no doubt, as his exquisite tribute of 
flattery to the sage king, that Shakespeare dramatised 
the legendary history of Macbeth, and brought on to the 
stage that Satanic agency in which his new sovereign 
had proclaimed such implicit faith. This popular belief 
was the very element on which Shakespeare delighted 
to work. His was not the weak fancy which takes 
refuge in that which is strange or unfamiliar, as therefore 
original. That the fancy he was to sport with was 
already familiar to the popular mind was one of the 
strongest reasons for its selection ; and when he did 
embody the ' airy nothing,' the very charm and triumph 
of his art was that it seemed no more than the realisa- 
tion of what all had known even from their cradle. 
The art is so perfect that no artifice could be discerned ; 
and as they looked from the cock-pit of the Globe or 
Blackfriars, into that wonderful dramatic mirror, Shake- 
speare's Englishmen fancied they saw no more than 
what they had been familiar with all their lives. 

When the poet introduced ' the weird sisters ' on the 
stage, as beings of that antique and legendary world of 
historic myth which it suited his purpose to dramatise, 
he dealt with what was as realistically present to the 
faith of his own age, as the fauns and satyrs, or the 
Olympian deities, with which Sophocles or Aristophanes 
peopled the Attic drama. His withered hags are sur- 
rounded with all the properties of current superstition ; 
and, with marvellous art, they are endowed with the 



158 GHOSTS AND WITCHES. 

highest supernatural agency of such malignant emis- 
saries of Satan, yet with no over-refined idealism to 
rob them of their vulgar verisimilitude. Graymalkin 
and Paddock are their familiars. Their incantations 
are in perfect accordance with the folk-lore of the 
seventeenth and later centuries. The brinded cat, the 
hedge-pig and the toad, the potent charm of a wrecked 
pilot's thumb, and the sieve in which to outweather the 
storm ; while the bewitched sailor — for no better reason 
than that his wife has withheld her chestnuts from the 
hag — 

'Shall live a man forbid; 
Weary se'nnights nine times nine 
Shall he dwindle, peak, and pine : 
Though his bark cannot be lost, 
Yet it shall be tempest-tost,' — 

as the king himself had been, on his homeward voyage 
with his bride ; and, as he doubted not, through just 
such agents of the powers of darkness. The very 
meanness of the vulgar agency by which Macbeth is 
seduced into disloyalty adds to the moral force of the 
drama. If he is to stoop to such baseness, it is fitting 
it should be at the promptings of such beldams as 
trade and traffic with him. 

With just enough of the supernatural for their 
malignant vocation,- — the distillation of the moon's 
' vaporous drop,' the ' yew slivered in the moon's 
eclipse,' and the like mystic charms, — they ' hover 
through the fog and filthy air;' or again, the 'secret, 
black, and midnight hags ' surround the cauldron, with 
the boil and bubble of its hell-broth of newt and frog, 
toad and snake, adder's fork and blind-worm's sting, 

' Tooth of wolf and maw of shark, 
Root of hemlock digg'd i' the dark, 
Liver of blaspheming Jew, 
Finger of birth-strangled babe,' 



GHOSTS AXD WITCHES. 



and all else that seems most loathsome and horrible, 
wherewith to work the incantations that are to lure 
their victim to perdition. Thus while seemingly intro- 
ducing no more than the familiar accessories of the 
vulgar witch, Shakespeare elevates the weird sisters 
who haunt the blasted heath into Satanic spirits, more 
akin to the Eumenides of Greek tragedy : the agents 
of hell sporting with the doomed soul, which has wel- 
comed temptation, and so made itself their prey. 

In ' Hamlet' again another phase of popular folk-lore 
is transmuted with like ready art into the legitimate 
agency of ' gorgeous tragedy in sceptred pall.' The 
ghost of Hamlet's dead father haunts the old scenes 
of life's fitful fever ; and, like vulgarest bugbear of the 
village rustic, vanishes at the cock-crow. But with this 
is interwoven another and more reverent dogma of the 
popular creed, not yet wholly eradicated. The purga- 
torial fires are rekindled to show by their light the 
disembodied spirit of the dead king. It is, as we know, 
a character which the author specially favoured. He 
personated it himself ; revised its idealisation in the later 
versions of the tragedy ; and perfected to his own high 
ideal the impalpable spirit in visible incongruity, late 
hearsed in death and quietly inurned, and now once 
again abroad, ' revisiting the glimpses of the moon, 
making night hideous.' It is, indeed, as this impersona- 
tion of the dead king that the ever-living poet reappears 
if we would recall him as the actor in his own dramas. 
The majesty of buried Denmark, in complete steel, — 

' The very armour he had on 
When he the ambitious Norway combated ; ' 

and yet ' as the air invulnerable.' With no other cha- 
racter can we so freely associate the personality of 
Shakespeare. We may think of him, with the help of 



160 GHOSTS AND WITCHES. 

Cornelius Jansen's fine portrait, in rich lace collar and 
velvet doublet, such courtly dress as befitted the gentle- 
man of Elizabeth's or James's reign ; or in plainer, yet 
still becoming attire, as in the Chandos portrait, or 
the Stratford bust. But with all of those the carping 
critic intermeddles with doubts and questionings, such 
as find no place when, to the mind's eye, the poet, 
impersonating one of his most marvellous imaginings, 

' Armed at all points exactly, cap-a-pe, 
Appears before us, and with solemn march 
Goes slow and stately by.' 

He has realised for himself how a spirit should 
walk ; how it should speak. We hear for ourselves the 
voice of that unresting ghost ; the disembodied spirit, 
clothed in shadowy form and vestments of the dead 
father, as, in spite of fate, he tells ' the secrets of his 
prison-house ; ' and all that is vulgar, grotesque, or 
incongruous, is at once exorcised from our minds. 

' We do it wrong, being so majestical, 
To offer it the show of violence.' 

But there is one appearance of the ghost in this subtle 
tragedy, which invites special study. When first dis- 
covered, it comes on the startled watch, stalking as it 
were from out the void which lies beyond the castle 
parapet, ' that beetles o'er his base into the sea.' We 
look forth from the battlements of Elsinore Castle, into 
the still night, with the ocean far beneath ; while over- 
head 

' Yond same star that's westward from the pole 
Has made his course to illume that part of heaven 
Where now it burns.' 

Though challenged in vain by Horatio, as with martial 
stalk it has gone by, the ghost is visible to all. It has, 
indeed, repeatedly appeared at the same dread hour, and 



GHOSTS AND WITCHES. 



been the wonder of fresh observers, ere it faded ' at the 
crowing of the cock.' But there is a later scene (Act iii. 
Scene 4), where Hamlet upbraids his mother with her 
complicity in the wrongs of his murdered father, until 
she exclaims — 

' O Hamlet, speak no more ; 
Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul, 
And there I see such black and grained spots 
As will not leave their tinct.' 

As he presses home the charge to which her own con- 
science thus responds, in the midst of a contemptuous 
anathema at the new king, Hamlet suddenly breaks off, 
with the awe-struck invocation — 



' Save me, and hover o'er me with your wings 
You heavenly guards ! ' 

and then he demands, ' What would your gracious 
figure ? ' for the spirit of his dead father is once more 
present to his sight. But the queen sees nothing ; hears 
only her son's words, addressed in deepest awe to ' the 
incorporal air;' is all unconscious of the awful presence 
and utterances of the visitant from the unseen world, 
who owns an interest in her still. Are we to understand 
that the disembodied spirit can be visible to whom it 
will ; and that the love stronger than death, which sur- 
vives in this ghostly compassion for her, manifests itself 
in such forbearance ? In the midst of its charge to 
Hamlet, it suddenly breaks off: — 

' But look, amazement on thy mother sits ; 
O, step between her and her fighting soul; 
Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works; 
Speak to her, Hamlet. 

Ham. How is it with you, lady? 

Queen. Alas, how is 't with you, 
That you do bend your eye on vacancy, 
And with th 1 incorporal air do hold discourse? 
Forth at your eyes your spirits wildly peep; 
M 



162 GHOSTS AND WITCHES. 

And, as the sleeping soldiers in the alarm, 
Your bedded hairs, like life in excrements, 
Start up and stand on end. O gentle son, 
Upon the heat and flame of thy distemper 
Sprinkle cool patience. Whereon do you look? 

Ham. On him ! on him ! Look you, how pale he glares ! 
His form and cause conjoin 'd, preaching to stones, 
Would make them capable. Do not look upon me ; 
Lest with this piteous action you convert 
My stern effects : then what I have to do 
Will want true colour; tears, perchance, for blood. 

Queen. To whom do ye speak this? 

Ham. Do you see nothing ther e ? 

Queen. Nothing at all; yet all that is, I see. 

Ham. Nor did you nothing hear ? 

Queen. No, nothing but ourselves. 

Ham. Why, look you there ! look, how it steals away ! 
My father, in his habit as he lived! 
Look, where he goes, even now, out at the portal ! ' 

And as the ghost disappears, the queen all unconsciously 
turns on Hamlet with the exclamation — 

' This is the very coinage of your brain : 
This bodiless creation ecstasy 
Is very cunning in. 

Ham. Ecstasy ! 

My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time, 
And makes as healthful music. It is not madness 
That I have utter'd : bring me to the test 
And I the matter will re-word; which madness 
Would gambol from. Mother, for love of grace, 
Lay not that flattering unction to your soul, 
That not your trespass but my madness speaks.' 

In the analogous scene in ' Macbeth,' where the ghost 
of Banquo suddenly rises in the banquet hall — invisible 
to all but the usurper, whose guilty soul it appals, — the 
apparition utters no words ; and on the German stage, 
where the dramas of Shakespeare excite an enthusiasm 
akin to that of the old playgoers of the Elizabethan 
Globe or Blackfriars, it is customary to introduce no 
visible ghost, but to leave the effect to be realised as a 



GHOSTS AND WITCHES. [63 

mere creation of Macbeth's fancy. In the realistic litc- 
ralness of the English stage, the auditor has to reverse 
the process, and assume the invisibility of Banquo to all 
but the king. Lady Macbeth, after making light to 
their ' worthy friends ' of this strange fit of her lord as 
momentary, ' but a thing of custom ; 'tis no other ; only 
it spoils the pleasure of the time,' turns on him with the 
challenge — 

' Are you a man ? 

Macb. Ay, and a bold one, that dare look on that 
Which might appal the devil. 

Lady M. O proper stuff! 

This is the very painting of your fear : 
This is the air-drawn dagger, which, you said, 
Led you to Duncan. O, these flaws and starts, 
Impostors to true fear, would well become 
A woman's story at a winter's fire, 
Authorised by her grandam. Shame itself! 
Why do you make such faces? When all's done 
You look but on a stool. 

Macb. Prithee, see there! behold! look! lo ! how say you? 
Why, what care I? If thou canst nod, speak too.' 

And so the scene proceeds, until at his 

' Hence, horrible shadow 
Unreal mockery, hence ! ' 

the ghost finally disappears, while the guests are sum- 
marily desired by Lady Macbeth to stay all questioning 
and go at once. To them it has been invisible through- 
out the scene. It is an added marvel to the conscience- 
stricken Macbeth that they should ( keep the natural 
ruby of their cheeks ' in the presence of such a ' horrible 
shadow.' To him it is too real to admit of a doubt that 
it has glared on all alike. The impalpable apparition has 
its ghostly presence anew impressed on our imaginations 
by this capricious visibility. A discriminating criticism 
can, indeed, assign other reasons for its invisibility to 
the queen in 'Hamlet'; while to Lady Macbeth some 
M 2 



1 64 GHOSTS AND WITCHES. 

critics assume that the ghost of Banquo is not less mani- 
fest than to her husband ; though she has gazed un- 
blanched on that ' which might appal the devil,' being, 
indeed, the very creature of his work and theirs. She 
has schooled herself to the worst. To her ' the sleeping 
and the dead are but as pictures ;' and she coldly re- 
sponds to her husband's passion : ' When all's done, you 
look but on a stool.' 

The ghost in 'Julius Csesar' is still more nearly the 
mere creation of a distempered fancy. It does, indeed, 
speak, and tells the noble Roman of yet another meeting ; 
but the ear may be as much ' made the fool o' the other 
senses ' as the eye ; and so it is with reason that Brutus 
exclaims — 

' I think it is the weakness of mine eyes 
That shapes this monstrous vision.' 

As to the ghosts that haunt the couch of Richard on 
the eve of Bosworth's fatal day, — though they also utter 
words more horrible than the vision which appals the 
eye, — they may be regarded, like other nearly similar 
presentations, as 'false creations, proceeding from the 
heat-oppressed brain,' the dramatic embodiments of the 
tyrant's nightmare dream. 

' Shadows to-night 
Have struck more terror to the soul of Richard 
Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers 
Armed in proof.' 

So far however we see that the poet moves with 
equal ease and clearness of vision in that shadowy world 
of dreams and enchantments, as in his own sublunary 
sphere ; and at the waving of his incentive wand, the 
sports of fancy and the creatures of vulgar folk-lore 
come forth and reveal themselves in consistent harmony 
with all the highest aims of dramatic art. But the ghosts 



GHOSTS AND WITCHES. 165 

and the witches of this strange realm of fancy constitute 
but a small part of the supernatural elements in the 
Shakespearean drama ; and stand indeed in striking 
and purposed contrast to the wanderers from Fairy- 
land, the creatures of the elements, or the like airy 
sprites : beings as unsubstantial as ' the air-drawn 
dagger' of Macbeth, and yet each with an individuality 
as distinct as that of the usurping thane, 



CHAPTER X. 

FAIRY FOLK-LORE. 

'Such sights as youthful poets dream 
On summer eves by haunted stream.' — V Allegro. 

WHEN Puck is commanded by Oberon, 'the King 
of Shadows,' who rules supreme in the 'Mid- 
summer Night's Dream,' to amend the mischief he has 
wrought, by wilful knavery or mischance, upon the rival 
Athenian lovers, and to work new pranks for their un- 
doing, that fairies and mortals alike may be at peace, he 
replies — 

' My fairy lord, this must be done with haste, 
For night's swift dragons cut the clouds full fast, 
And yonder shines Aurora's harbinger : 
At whose approach, ghosts, wandering here and there, 
Troop home to churchyards; damned spirits all, 
That in crossways and floods have burial, 
Already to their wormy beds are gone; 
For fear lest day should look their shames upon, 
They wilfully themselves exile from light, 
And must for aye consort with black-brow'd night.' 

In this the poet glances at those gloomier superstitions 
which are more or less characteristic of all rude concep- 
tions of the invisible world. They constitute its pre- 
dominating aspect in the savage mind, and were by no 
means wanting in English folk-lore. It is not to be sup- 
posed that the rude peasantry of England had fashioned 
out of the Feld-celfen or Dvergar of their Saxon or 
Norsk fathers the airy haunters of their moonlit glades, 
devoid of all such repulsive features as survive in 



FAIRY FOLK-LORE. 167 

the ballad-pictures of Scottish Elfland. To both they 
were objects of vague apprehension. But the English 
fairy, fashioned under more genial circumstances than 
the wild social life and the rugged landscape of their 
northern neighbours, was a tricksy and mischievous, but 
not a malignant sprite. In Chaucer's ' Rime of Sire 
Topas,' purposely written to ridicule the extravagances 
of the romancers, the knight sets forth in search of ad- 
ventures, and, in 'the countree of Faerie' meets with 
the 'gret geaunt Sire Oliphant,' on whom his prowess 
is to be shown. But, though it is a land of wonders, 
where, as in Spenser's later visions, giants, dragons, and 
monsters of all sorts may be looked for, its true fairy- 
folk have no such repulsive characteristics ; and of its 
elfin queen we learn : — 

' Here is the Quene of Faerie, 
With harpe, and pipe, and simphonie, 
Dwelling in this place.' 

The charms of Fairyland, which were left in Scotland 
to rude nameless ballad minstrels, who perpetuated 
without disguise the current superstitions of the people, 
thus early took the fancy of England's greatest poets ; 
and hence whatever was coarse, gloomy, and fit only to 
' consort with black-browed night," was eliminated from 
its airy beings. But the gloom of this supernatural 
element clung to the northern folk-lore. The persecu- 
tions of the seventeenth century, and the grave aspects 
of their later religious belief and forms of worship, doubt- 
less helped to beget that mood of mind in the Scottish 
peasantry which continued to find a charm in the 
darkest superstitions of their forefathers. 

Burns, in his ' Halloween,' perpetuates, towards the 
close of the eighteenth century, with mingled humour 
and gravity, the unsophisticated superstitions of the 



1 68 FAIRY FOLK-LORE. 

peasantry with reference to that grand anniversary 
of witches, fiends, and all the powers of evil, which 
by a curious association of ideas had been assigned 
to All Saints' Eve. Then also the fairies were reputed 
to hold high festival, and to be specially active in their 
good or evil doings for mankind. They had power to 
prosper or blight according to their humour. Household, 
flock and field were at their mercy ; and they were 
believed never to overlook a slight or forget a favour. 
But though ' Halloween ' is specially noted by the 
peasant bard as falling 

'Upon that night, when faeries light, 
On Cassilis Downans dance, 
Or owre the lays, in splendid blaze, 
On sprightly coursers prance,' 

yet the fairies are displaced by more prosaic and bane- 
ful agents of darkness, in the incidents of the night. 
They were already falling into disrepute ; while ghosts, 
witches, and the emissaries of Satan were denounced, 
but by no means discredited, by the ecclesiastical censors 
of the age. With a curious definiteness, unusual in rela- 
tion to such shadowy beings as the fairies of Scottish 
Elfland, Allan Cunningham tells us, ' it is generally ad- 
mitted that they left our land about seventy years ago. 
Their mournings and moanings among the hills on the 
Hallowmass night of their departure— according to the 
assertion of an old shepherd, — were melancholy to hear.' 
Allan Cunningham wrote thus in 1834 ; so that it is now 
a full century since the rocky downs of Cassilis, and the 
coves and moonlit valleys of Scotland, ceased to echo to 
the ringing of the fairies' bridle-reins and the music of 
their corn-pipes and bog-reeds.- 

But ere the last echoes of fairy music had died away, 
another peasant poet shaped their most favourite legend- 



FAIRY FOLK-LORE. .69 

ary prank into a rhyme of sweetest fancy and pathos. 
The dreaded mischief of the Scottish fairy was the 
transporting of children to Elfland, and leaving in their 
place the unsightly changeling which figures in many a 
village tale. But out of this rude superstition, common 
to the Scottish and Irish peasantry, the Ettrick Shepherd 
wrought his exquisite legend of ' Kilmeny,' a virgin pure, 
carried off to Fairyland, beyond the reach of sin and 
sorrow ; and returning but for a month and a day, to 
charm all nature with a glimpse of perfect purity and 
peace. 

' When seven lang years had come and fled, 

When grief was calm, and hope was dead; 
When scarce was remembered Kilmeny's name, 
Late, late in a gloamin Kilmeny cam hame!' 

But the vision of her return, though exceedingly beau- 
tiful, is wholly fancy-wrought, and need not detain us 
here. It is otherwise with Shakespeare's picturings of 
Fairyland. In his day the fairy held his unchallenged 
place in popular belief, and his bridle bells were still 
listened for in Charlecote chace. The poet accordingly 
pictured the actual Fairyland of his age, though what- 
ever gloomy phantoms still haunted English glades and 
dells were banished from his poetic vision. Hence when 
the lord of Fairyland responds to the exhortation of 
Puck for needful haste, since night's fitting time, when 
ghosts and damned spirits alone venture abroad, is almost 
past, it is to disown all such affinities. He acknowledges 
no such restraints as those which made the ghost of 
buried Denmark haunt ' the dead vast and middle of the 
night,' and start ' like a guilty thing upon a fearful sum- 
mons,' at the first morning cock-crow ; and hence he 
thus repels Puck's reasons for haste, as wholly inappli- 
cable to spirits such as they arc. From choice they 



1 70 FAIR Y FOLK-I ORE. 

court the paler light, and make their favourite haunts in 
the moonlit glade : — 

1 But we are spirits of another sort ; 
I with the morning's love have oft made sport; 
And like a forester, the groves may tread, 
Even till the eastern gate, all fiery-red, 
Opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams, 
Turns into yellow gold his salt green streams.' 

The cock's shrill clarion has no warning dread for them ; 
but when they hear the morning lark their pleasure is to 
run before the dawn, 

' Tripping after the night's shade 
Swifter than the wandering moon.' 

They are shadowy beings, unsubstantial as the moon- 
beam, and therefore such as soft stillness and the night 
become ; but with no affinity to the murky gloom which 
Macbeth associates with his ' secret, black, and midnight 
hags.' There is no confusion of the widely diverse ele- 
ments of that supernatural world which played so familiar 
a part in the realisations of popular credulity. With 
nicest delicacy the poet discriminates between the witches 
and other traffickers with the poAvers of hell ; or the 
'sheeted dead,' and the unresting spirits of murdered 
men, which haunted the age with gloomy superstitions : 
and those widely diverse creations wherewith the fanciful 
folk-lore, inherited from elder generations, had peopled 
grove and flowery dell, woodland, marsh and lake, with 
goblins, sprites and fays, best fitted to sport in poet's 
visions. Of this wholly different class are such ethereal 
imaginings as flit like rainbow gleams, playing their part 
among the mortals who, ' in nightly revels and new 
jollity' celebrate Hippolyta's nuptials in 'A Midsum- 
mer Night's Dream ;' or in ' The Tempest ' help to light 
Hymen's lamps for Prospero's more gentle daughter, 



FA TRY FOLK-LORE. 



They are the refined creations of an exquisite poetic 
fancy, working with the current material of what had 
doubtless charmed the boy in the familiar fairy-lore of 
the old Stratford ingle-nook, or haunted his moonlit 
wanderings among the glades of Charlecote Chase. 

Among such familiar fairy-folk, Puck, or Robin Good- 
fellow, stands out with exceptional clearness and strongly 
marked individuality, playing his pranks on the odd 
' human mortals ' — 

'The crew of patches, rude mechanicals, 
That work for bread upon Athenian stalls ' — 

who chance to cross the path of Oberon and Titania, 
amid their revels, and their chidings over the sweet 
changeling whom the fairy king would have as knight 
of his train. The elves and fays, with the jealous 
Oberon and his wilful queen, are beings such only 

' As youthful poets dream 
On summer eves by haunted stream. 5 

But the Puck of this midsummer night's dream is 
such as could pertain only to one poet's vision. The 
' drudging goblin,' is indeed introduced by Milton in 
the 'L' Allegro,' among the fire-side tales told over the 
spicy nut-brown ale. But the youthful poet is dream- 
ing by no haunted stream ; but only telling, daintily 
enough, the oft-told tale of 

' How the drudging goblin sweat 
To earn his cream-bowl duly set, 
When in one night, ere glimpse of morn, 
His shadowy flail hath thrash'd the corn 
That ten day-labourers could not end : 
Then lies him down, the lubber fiend, 
And stretched out all the chimney's length; 
Basks at the fire his hairy strength; 
And crop-full out of door he flings 
Ere the first cock his matin rings.' 



172 FAIRY FOLK-L ORE. 

Here we have the popular conception of the rude 
goblin, a huge, ungainly lubber fiend, hairy as a satyr, 
drudging with loutish perseverance for his cream- 
bowl ; and when the bribe is earned, flinging his 
unwieldy length before the chimney-log, like the 
rudest toil-worn hind. But Shakespeare's Robin Good- 
fellow is no lubber fiend, but a rare poetical embodi- 
ment of the comedy of mischfef. ' My gentle Puck,' 
as Oberon calls that merry wanderer of the night, is 
a knavish elf, who esteems it choice sport to have set 
the fondest lovers a-jangling by mistake. He delights 
to play madcap pranks around the wassail bowl ; or 
even to lurk in it, ' in very likeness of a roasted crab,' 
cozening the old gossip in her posset, or toppling the 
spinster aunt, who in the midst of her saddest tale 
has been cheated into fancying him a three-foot stool. 
He is, in fact, the originator of all the mirthful mis- 
chances that seeming accident produces : — 

'And then the whole quire hold their hips and laugh; 
And waxen in their mirth, and neeze, and swear 
A merrier hour was never wasted there.' 

The fairy messenger of Queen Titania does indeed 
address him on their meeting as 'thou lob of spirits;' 
but he has scarcely spoken ere she recognises Oberon's 
henchman, who, at his bidding, ' will put a girdle round 
about the earth in forty minutes.' The mad sprite 
who frights the maidens of the villagery, and misleads 
night-wanderers, laughing at their harm, is ready 
to play his pranks on the Fairy Queen herself, now 
that Titania and her fairy lord have quarrelled. For, 
as he tells Titania's messengers — 

' Oberon is passing fell and wrath, 
Because that she as her attendant hath 
A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king; 
She never had so sweet a changeling: 



FAIRY FOLK-LORE. 173 

And jealous Oberon would have the child 

Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild ; 

But she perforce withholds the loved boy, 

Crowns him with flowers, and makes him all her joy. 

And now they never meet in grove or green, 

By fountain clear, or spangled starlight sheen, 

But they do square: that all their elves for fear, 

Creep into acorn cups and hide them there. 

Fairy. Either I mistake your shape and making quite, 
Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite 
Call'd Robin Goodfellow : are not you he 
That frights the maidens of the villagery ; 
Skim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern, 
And bootless make the breathless housewife churn; 
And sometime make the drink to bear no barm ; 
Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm ? 
Those that Hobgoblin call you, and sweet Puck, 
You do their work, and they shall have good luck : 
Are not you he ? 

Puck. Thou speak'st aright ; 

I am that merry wanderer of the night. 
I jest to Oberon, and make him smile, 
When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile, 
Neighing in likeness of a filly foal : 
And sometime lurk I in a gossip's bowl.' 

And so the madcap sprite gleefully recounts his mis- 
chief-makings, until Oberon summons him to spoil 
Titania's moonlight revels, and bewitch her with 
deceitful fantasies. The gravest meanings not infre- 
quently lurk under the humours of Shakespeare's 
comedy. The natural and supernatural are inter- 
blended there, as in the living world and all the 
simplest mysteries of life. ' Nothing happens by chance' 
is a canon of the rustic creed ; ' Every effect has 
a cause,' says the village philosopher : in illustration 
of which, the poet, sporting with the folk-lore of his 
time, educes harmonious solutions in relation to in- 
cidents too homely for the theologian's care ; and by 
agencies as remote from his ample faith in the super- 



1 74 FAIR Y FOLK-LORE. 

natural as from the dynamics of modern philosophy. 
The mishaps of the dairy, the good luck of the barn, 
or the laughter-moving accident to the gossip by the 
hearth, are all the work of Hobgoblin or Sweet 
Puck. The graver mischances of seed-time and har- 
vest, which perplex the husbandman and rob him of 
the fruits of his toil, are in like manner traceable to 
fairy brawls. Oberon and Titania have fallen out, and 

' Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain, 
As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea 
Contagious fogs : which falling in the land, 
Have every pelting river made so proud, 
That they have overborne their continents ; 
The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain, 
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn 
Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard; 
The fold stands empty in the drowned field, 
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock; 
The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud, 
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green 
For lack of tread are undistinguishable. 
The human mortals want their winter here; 
No night is now with hymn or carol blest: 
Therefore the moon, the governess of floods, 
Pale in her anger, washes all the air, 
That rheumatic diseases do abound; 
And thorough this distemperature, we see 
The seasons alter: hoary- headed frosts 
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose ; 
And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown 
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds 
Is, as in mockery, set ; the spring, the summer, 
The childing autumn, angry winter, change 
Their wonted liveries ; and the 'mazed world, 
By their increase, now knows not which is which ; 
And this same progeny of evil comes 
From our debate, from our dissension ; 
We are their parents and original.' 

And so, to amend such 'forgeries of jealousy,' Puck 
steps in with his glamour. Titania becomes the victim 



FAIRY FOLK-LORE. 



of his pranks, and is beguiled of her Indian boy by 
a fraud as simple as the roasted crab in the gossip's 
bowl. The juice of the little western flower ' now 
purple with love's wound,' is laid on her sleeping 
eyelids ; Bottom the weaver, ' shallowest thick-skin ' of 
all the crew of rude mechanicals from Athenian stalls, 
befitted with ' an ass's nowl ' instead of his own con- 
ceited pate, is laid to sleep near the bower where the 
fairy Queen reposes in fitting state, on 

' A bank where the wild thyme blows, 
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows; 
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, 
With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine. 



. And so it came to pass 
Titania waked, and straightway loved an ass.' 

The harmonious interblending of such strange incon- 
gruities leads to ever-new phases of gracefullest fan- 
tasy. The love-beglamoured fairy forthwith entertains 
her monster-lover with all queenly courtesies. She 
engages to purge his mortal grossness so that he shall 
thenceforth be like airy spirit. A bevy of fantastic 
sprites, more insubstantial than the gossamer-web — 
Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustard-seed, are 
commissioned to tend on him with such services as 
only fairies can render ; and the incongruities of the 
enamoured fairy and the gross Athenian mechanical, 
are wrought out in details in which broad fantastic 
humour and the most delicate grace interblend in per- 
fect harmony. Peaseblossom and his fairy comrades answer 
their mistress's summons, and receive her orders : — 

' Be kind and courteous to this gentleman ; 
Hop in his walks and gambol in his eyes; 
Feed him with apricocks and dewberries, 
With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries; 
The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees, 



176 FAIRY FOLK-L ORE. 

And for night tapers crop their waxen thighs 
And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes. 
To have my love to bed and to arise; 
And pluck the wings from painted butterflies 
To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes ; 
Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies.' 

And so the airy shadows of this poet-dream disport 
themselves beneath the wandering moon, till the mortals 
have closed their revels and withdrawn ; Oberon, recon- 
ciled to Titania, has followed with their fairy train ; and 
Puck, ere he too vanishes, thus addresses us : — 

' If we shadows have offended, 
Think but this, and all is mended, 
That you have but slumber 'd here, 
While these visions did appear, 
And this weak and idle theme, 
No more yielding but a dream.' 

It is the same sportive inexhaustible fancy which 
squanders its lavish wealth in ' Romeo and Juliet ' 
when Mercutio describes the dream-freaks of Queen 
Mab, ' the fairy's midwife.' Yet Queen Mab and Queen 
Titania has each a realm of her own ; and the two stand 
out in striking contrast, with equally diverse functions and 
individuality. Titania is, throughout, the refined ideal 
of the moon-lit dreamland over which she reigns. She 
looses none of her queenly dignity by the pranks which 
Robin Goodfellow is allowed to play on her. She yields 
herself so absolutely to the potent spell of that 'little 
western flower,' that under its glamour, she can disport 
herself with queenly grace in the very arms of her 
monster-lover. The charm of the comedy indeed lies 
in the curious interblendings of exquisite fancy and the 
sweetest glimpses of nature, with the lighter humour of 
the play : as when Oberon is moved to pity as he watches 
the favours which Titania is lavishing on the transformed 
lout. The elves over whom they reign are wont, like the 



FAIR Y FOLK-L ORE. 1 7 7 

bee, to ' murmur by the hour in fox-glove bells.' On 
duty bent, they ' hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear ;' or, 
when affrighted by the wrath of Oberon and his queen, 
'creep into acorn-cups and hide them there.' It is in 
exquisite harmony with such revellers among the zephyrs 
and the flowers, that their repentant fairy lord exclaims 
at sight of his queen toying with her Athenian swain, 
and sticking musk-roses on his ass's head : — ■ 

' Her dotage now I do begin to pity ; 
For meeting her of late behind the wood, 
Seeking sweet favours for this hateful fool, 
I did upbraid her, and fall out with her ; 
For she his hairy temples then had rounded 
With coronet of fresh and fragrant flowers ; 
And that same dew, which sometimes on the buds 
Was wont to swell, like round and orient pearls, 
Stood now within the pretty flowerets' eyes, 
Like tears that did their own disgrace bewail.' 

The incongruities of those ' four nights which quickly 
dream away the time ' between the opening scene and 
the arrival of the fair Hippolyta's nuptial hour, are in 
perfect harmony with the wonderland of any midsummer 
night's dream. The fair Hermia betricked by Puck ; 
Theseus of Athens and his Amazonian Queen enter- 
tained on their wedding-night with the interlude of 
' Pyramus and Thisbe,' played by Quince, Bottom, 
Starveling, and poor Snug with his extempore roaring ; 
and the Fairy Queen pursuing with the soul of love the 
transmogrified weaver, her ear not less enchanted with 
his singing than her eye with the grace of his hairy 
nowl : all blend together as in the gay romance of the 
dreamer. 

The contrasts are equally striking, yet of a different 
kind, which furnish the bold dramatic antithesis of ' The 
Tempest.' The princely magician, Prospero, engrossed 
N 



178 FAIRY FOLK-L ORE. 

by his researches into the mysteries of nature and occult 
science, has been robbed of his dukedom by the per- 
fidious brother whom he had appointed as his deputy. 
Escaping the death to which he had been consigned, we 
find him with the sharer of his ' sea-sorrow,' an only 
daughter, and his magical books, transported to that 
desert island the localisation of which has already been 
attempted in the geography of that ideal hemisphere 
where such enchanted islands are found. There Pros- 
pero reigns lord of nature and all her mysteries. His 
daughter Miranda, so peerless in her perfect innocency, 
has tempted us to some notice in a previous chapter. 
Not quite three years old when borne with her father to 
this lone retreat, she remembers only ' far off and like a 
dream,' the face of woman ; and there she has grown 
up, her father's sole companion, like a pure lily, the 
unconscious embodiment of maidenly delicacy, a very 
child of nature. She is not indeed without some fitting 
education ; for, as her father says, — 

'Here 
Have I, thy schoolmaster, made thee more profit 
Than other princesses can, that have more time 
For vainer hours, and tutors not so careful.' 

But though Miranda is her father's sole companion ; and 
Shakespeare, or his first editors, have styled it an unin- 
habited island : they are neither its first settlers nor its 
sole inhabitants. The foul witch Sycorax, who with 
age and envy was grown into a hoop, ' for mischiefs 
manifold and sorceries too terrible to enter human hear- 
ing,' would have been put to death, but for some un- 
named redeeming deed for which they would not take 
her life. So the sailors brought her from her native 
Argier and left her on the island. This blear-eyed hag, 
in the working of her unearthly spells, had enthralled an 



FA IR i ' FOLK-L ORE. 



U9 



ethereal being, too refined to be turned by her to any- 
serviceable account, and dying, left behind her that most 
refined and daintiest of sylphs, Ariel. Prospero, in 
whom he has found a more congenial master, and to 
whom, therefore, he has done worthy service, is never- 
theless the stern exacting lord, though he claims the 
gratitude of his ethereal slave, and angrily taunts him 
that he 

' Thinks it much to tread the ooze 
Of the salt deep, 

To run upon the sharp wind of the north, 
To do me business in the veins o' the earth 
When it is baked with frost ; ' 

and so Prospero demands— 

' Hast thou forgot 
The foul witch, Sycorax? .... 

Thou, my slave, 

As thou report'st thyself, was then her servant ; 

And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate 

To act her earthy and abhorr'd commands, 

Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee, 

By help of her more potent ministers, 

And in her most immitigable rage, 

Into a cloven pine; within which rift 

Imprison'd thou didst painfully remain 

A dozen years ; within which space she died, 

And left thee there; where thou didst vent thy groans 

As fast as mill-wheels strike. Then was this island — 

Save for the son that she did litter here, 

A freckled whelp, hag-born, — not honour'd with 

A human shape. 

Ariel. Yes ; Caliban, her son. 

Pros. Dull thing, I say so ; he, that Caliban, 
Whom now I keep in service. Thou best know'st 
What torment I did find thee in : thy groans 
Did make wolves howl, and penetrate the breasts 
Of ever-angry bears ; it was a torment 
To lay upon the damn'd, which Sycorax 
Could not again undo : it was mine art, 
N 2 



FAIRY FOLK-LORE. 



When I arrived and heard thee, that made gape 
The pine, and let thee out. 

Ariel. I thank thee, master. 

Pros. If thou more murmur'st, I will rend an oak, 
And peg thee in his knotty entrails, till 
Thou hast howl'd away twelve winters. 

Ariel. Pardon, master; 

I will be correspondent to command, 
And do my spiriting gently.' 

And so the airy sylph, subject to the exactions of this 
imperious master, but now promised his liberty on the 
third day, joyfully departs to assume the character of a 
nymph of the sea, and in that shape to do his bidding. 

Ariel is as ethereal as that other strange island- 
dweller, Caliban, ' the freckled whelp, hag-born,' is of the 
earth earthy. Yet he has a well-defined individuality 
among the beings of that airy world which is his natural 
element. He is a gay, sprightly, and even frolicsome 
spirit, not wholly without the mischievous qualities 
of Puck, but gentler and more refined in his spiriting, 
and of his own choice seeking his pastimes far from 
mortal haunts. His joyous nature does indeed derive a 
pleasure from the successful mischief-makings on which 
he is commissioned ; but all the while he is envying the 
free lark and butterfly, and rather sports with his poor 
dupes because of the commands of Prospero, than that, 
like the madcap goblin Puck, he finds his own delight 
in such pranks. For such 'earthy and abhorred com- 
mands ' as the Argier witch alone had to lay on him, he 
was a spirit too delicate ; but, though all the while long- 
ing and thirsting for freedom, as we might fancy a 
captive butterfly or honey-bee, there is nothing re- 
pulsive to him in the quaintest of Prospero's tasks. 
He tells with manifest glee of his having performed to 
a point the tempest he was commissioned to raise ; 



FAIRY FOLK-LORE. 



yea, to every article he has accomplished his strange 
bidding : — 

' I boarded the King's ship ; now on the beak, 
Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin, 
I flamed amazement : sometimes I'd divide, 
And burn in many places ; on the topmast, 
The yards and bowsprit, would I flame distinctly, 
Then meet and join. Jove's lightnings, the precursors 
O' the dreadful thunder-claps, more momentary 
And sight-outrunning were not : the fire and cracks 
Of sulphurous roaring the most mighty Neptune 
Seem to besiege, and make his bold waves tremble, 
Yea, his dread trident shake.' 

' My brave spirit ! ' Prospero responds, in admiration of 
such perfect fulfilment of his wishes, ' who was so 
constant, that this coil would not infect his reason ? ' to 
which Ariel thus gleefully answers : — 

' Not a soul 
But felt a fever of the mad, and play'd 
Some tricks of desperation. All but mariners 
Plunged in the foaming brine, and quit the vessel, 
Then all afire with me : the King's son, Ferdinand, 
With hair up-staring, — then like reeds, not hair, — 
Was the first man that leap'd ; crying " Hell is empty, 
And all the devils are here ! " ' 

And so, having thus fulfilled the utmost wishes of his 
master in relation to the tempest, he is now able further 
to report that all are safe, ' not a hair perished : on their 
sustaining garments not a blemish, but fresher than be- 
fore ;' and all, as he had ordered, are dispersed in troops 
about the island, the king's son by himself ' cooling the 
air with sighs, in an odd angle of the isle.' 

Again Ariel recounts with liveliest satisfaction the 
rougher play with which he has outwitted the drunken 
conspiracy of Trinculo arid Stephano under the guidance 
of the poor monster Caliban. They are such pranks as 
would have been peculiarly acceptable to Puck, and 



FAIRY FOLK-LORE. 



seem to have proved in no way distasteful to the daintier 
spirit to whom the commands of the Argier witch were 
so abhorrent : — 

'I told you, Sir, they were red-hot with drinking; 
So full of valour that they smote the air 
For breathing in their faces ; beat the ground 
For kissing of their feet ; yet always bending 
Towards their project. Then I beat my tabor; 
At which like unback'd colts, they prick'd their ears, 
Advanced their eyelids, lifted up their noses 
As they smelt music: so I charmed their ears, 
That, calf-like, they my lowing followed through 
Tooth'd briers, sharp furzes, pricking gorse, and thorns, 
Which entered their frail shins. At last I left them 
I' the filthy-mantled pool beyond your cell, 
There dancing up to the chins, that the foul lake 
O'erstunk their feet.' 

Puck would have desired no choicer sport. But with 
Ariel, though done promptly, and with a pride in the 
execution of it to his master's utmost wishes, it is at best 
but pleasant task-work, performed under the promise 
■ thou shalt be free as mountain winds.' His gentler 
nature is shown in the child-like simplicity with which 
he recalls to Prospero this promised boon : — 

' I prithee, 

Remember that I have done thee worthy service; 

Told thee no lies, made thee no mistakings, served 

Without or grudge or grumblings ; thou didst promise 

To bate me a full year.' 

Miranda does not differ more clearly from Viola, Portia, 
or the wilful and witty Beatrice, than Ariel does from 
Puck, or any other of Shakespeare's airy creations. He 
is wholly incapable of the wanton mischief of that 
knavish sprite, who on learning that by preposterous 
mischance he has made Helena 'all fancy-sick and pale 
of cheer,' by apportioning to her the wrong lover ; and 
set the whole wooers in the piece a-j angling : is even 
more delighted at the mischief he has wrought, than 



FAIR Y FOLK-L ORE. 1 83 

when anticipating the meeting of the charmed lovers, 
he exclaims — ■ 

' Shall we their fond pageant see ? 
Lord, what fools these mortals be!' 

In striking contrast to this, Ariel is touched by the 
human sufferings with which he can have no fellow- 
feeling. When he tells of the usurping duke and his 
companions driven to distraction by their griefs, and 
above all, the good old lord Gonzalo, with tears running 
down his beard, ' like winter's drops from eaves,' he thus 
addresses Prospero — 

' Your charm so strongly works 'em, 
That if you now beheld them, your affections 
Would become tender. 

Pros. Dost thou think so, spirit? 

Ariel. Mine would, sir, were I human. 

Pros. And mine shall. 

Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling 
Of their afflictions, and shall not myself, 
One of their kind, that relish all as sharply, 
Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art ? 
Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick, 
Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury 
Do I take part ; the rarer action is 
In virtue than in vengeance : they being penitent, 
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend 
Not a frown further. Go, release them, Ariel.' 

To Ariel we are plainly left to assume that this is the 
more welcome duty ; to Puck it would have been alto- 
gether the reverse. Their troubles would have been 
sport to ' that shrewd knavish sprite,' who tells even 
Oberon, when he has challenged him for his blundering 

mischief — 

' That must needs be sport alone ; 
And those things do best please me 
That befal preposterously.' 

And so, while we seem to feel a sympathetic joy at 
Ariel's own release, as at the freedom of a caged lark, 



1 84 FAIR Y FOLK-L ORE. 



listening in fancy to his delighted song dying away as 
he soars into the limitless blue ; we are all the more 
fully prepared to enter into the feeling of Prospero : — 

• Why, that 's my dainty Ariel ! I shall miss thee ; 
But yet thou shalt have freedom.' 

All other duties fulfilled, Prospero at the last com- 
missions him to satisfy the promise already made, of 
calm seas and auspicious winds to waft them homeward, 
and catch the royal fleet far off, and so — 

'My Ariel, chick, 
That is thy charge : then to the elements, 
Be free, and fare thou well ! ' 

and with a swoop like that of the humming-bird which 
.has dallied long over some favourite flower, and then 
darts swift as thought out of sight, we seem to see 
Ariel float and soar away into the golden light of the 
setting sun. The song of Ariel realises for us the very 
thoughts and aspirations of such an embodied joy. It 
dies away on the mind's ear like the thrilling quiver of 
the mounting lark : — 

' Where the bee sucks, there suck I : 

In a cowslip's bell I lie; 

There I couch when owls do cry. 

On the bat's back I do fly 

After summer merrily. 
Merrily, merrily shall I live now, 
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.' 

For this exquisite creation Shakespeare had no more 
material to work upon than the same crude shapings of 
popular fancy and rustic superstition which gave him 
the lubber fiend out of which his Puck is fashioned. But 
there is a higher art in ' The Tempest ' than in 'A Mid- 
summer Night's Dream,' beautiful as both are. The 
pure poetry of richest fancy seems to entrance us into 
the very spirit of fairy revelling, amid the marvels raised 



FAIR Y FOLK-LORE. 



for us by Prospero's potent wand ; and then the poet dis- 
misses all back to the realm of dreams. As in the 
lighter comedy of ' A Midsummer Night's Dream,' Puck 
lingers, after Oberon, Titania, and their fairy train have 
vanished, to suggest that offence is needless, since per- 
chance you have but slumbered here ; so, with a more 
solemn earnestness, suited to the dignity of the speaker 
and the incidents of the drama, Prospero tells us how 
all ' are melted into thin air ; ' and then, moralising on 
the ' insubstantial pageant,' the ' baseless fabric of this 
vision,' as but the type of all that seems to us most 
real : even 'the great globe itself,' yea all which it in- 
habit ; he adds — 

' We are such stuff 

As dreams are made on; and our little life 

Is rounded with a sleep.' 

We have thus analysed certain objective creations that 
stand out with exceptional beauty or distinctive indi- 
viduality of character, among the supernatural dramatis 
persona which people the world of art created for us 
by the genius of Shakespeare. His witches, ghosts, and 
other impersonations of purely superstitious fancy, have 
their value in relation to the speculations of modern 
science ; for the belief in unseen or spiritual agencies, 
and in sorcerers or wizards by whom they can be in- 
fluenced or controlled, is acknowledged to be almost 
universal among the lowest savage races. As to his 
Oberon and Titania, his Mab, Puck, and Ariel ; the 
king of shadows and queen of dreams, the fairy, goblin 
and sprite of popular folk-lore : they too have an 
interest for the modern student of science, who can 
value the transformation of the crude imaginings of 
rustic superstition into concrete forms of refined poetic 
art. Artistically they command our admiration by their 



1 86 FAIRY FOLK-L ORE. 

realisation in clearly defined individuality of what, till 
Shakespeare embodied them, had flitted before the 
mind's eye as ghostly phantoms, vaguer than the crea- 
tures of our dreams. In this they only share with all 
the other characters of Shakespeare's drama, that charm 
of individual portraiture which makes each of them a 
study replete with hidden truth. 

Hence the embodied zephyr of ' The Tempest ' pos- 
sesses a personality so consistently defined, that we feel, 
while entranced in the evolution of the drama, that the 
doings of Ariel are no whit more improbable than those 
of Ferdinand and Miranda, even in the exquisitely 
natural glimpse flashed on us in the midst of a scene 
which opens with Prospero in his magic robes, and 
Ariel acting out his most potent charms. The magician 
promises to Alonzo of Naples — 

'I will requite you with as good a thing; 
At least bring forth a wonder to content you : ' 

and so he discloses to the glad father's eyes the two 
lovers seated at the chess-board : — 

'Mir, Sweet lord, you play me false. 

Fer. No, my dearest love, 

I would not for the world. 

Mir. Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle, 
And I would call it fair play.' 

Yet the moment we escape from the thrall of the poet's 
enchantment, and its world of fancy fades into the light 
of common day, we own to ourselves that ' our actors 
were all spirits, and are melted into air.' They are 
mere sports of fancy ; things of beauty for a perpetual 
joy ; but impossibilities in the sober reality of this world 
of fact and scientific realism. 

So far we have dealt with Ariel, and the beings of 
which he is the type, as fit subjects for literary criticism. 



FAIR Y FOLK-L ORE. 1 8 7 

Viewed as an illustration of synthetic power, this creature 
of a poet's fancy commends itself to every mind capable 
of appreciating the highest forms of art. Shakespeare 
had, as it were, the problem thus placed before him : — 
Assuming the four primary elements of the ancients ; 
and that they are peopled by such creatures as the 
Rosicrucian Sylphs, Gnomes, Naiads, and Pyroads, — 
beings endowed with natures each suited to the element 
which it inhabits : what would be the characteristics of 
an ethereal being, the dweller of the air ? The poet ac- 
cepts the task, animates a zephyr, brings it into intimate 
relations with the philosophic impersonation of active 
human intellect, and places it alongside of the em- 
bodiment of perfect feminine purity. It is a marvellous 
creation of genius, which the longer it is studied yields 
the more admiration and delight at the perfectness of a 
conception so thoroughly self-originated. But what has 
science to do with Rosicrucian sylphs or gnomes : the 
airy nothings fashioned to people the elements of an 
obsolete creed, which chemical analysis long since dis- 
sipated ? So far from modern science accepting the 
antique creed of the four elements : its gases, metals, 
earths, and other simplest chemical .constituents of the 
globe, already exceed sixty in number ; go on in ever 
increasing multiplicity ; and yet include among them as 
simple elements neither air, fire, earth, nor water. And 
for such elements as it owns, chemistry has its own 
spectrum analyses, eloquent in the truths they reveal. 
With its respirators, its diving bells, its balloons, and 
Davy lamps, science now makes its own sylphs, naiads, 
and gnomes : free enough from competition with the airy 
nothings begot in the fine frenzy of a poet's brain. 

We resign, then, all claim to the scientific recognition 
of these poetic creations, and dismiss them back to the 



FAIRY FOLK-LORE. 



realm of fancy. But what of that being which the same 
creative genius has produced for us in clearly defined 
impersonation, as though he had received and accepted 
this other problem also : — Assuming that the highest 
forms of animal life and organisation are nothing more 
than the results of evolution from the lowest, what would 
be the characteristics of the brute when developed into 
that nearest approximation to man of which the mere 
animal is capable ? It reads like the old enigma of 
the Theban sphinx ; and to it accordingly our modern 
CEdipus, the most objective of poets, bent all the powers 
of his genius. He has created for us a being fully 
realising the ideal of that seeming contradiction in terms, 
the rational brute ; and in doing so seems in all respects 
to anticipate that hypothetical product of evolution 
which modern science reproduces as the brute progenitor 
of man. Yet Shakespeare least of all dreamt of a 
human ancestor while working out this portraiture in 
minutest nicety of detail. To him of all men the 
distinction between man and his lower fellow-creatures 
seemed clear and ineffaceable. Hamlet, in his depre- 
ciatory self-torturings does indeed ask himself the 
question : — 

' What is a man, 
If his chief good and market of his time 
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.' 

But it is only that he may the more clearly infer that" 
man is no such mere animal, but, on the contrary, is the 
sole living creature endowed with 'god-like reason ;' the 
one being that exists in conscious relationship to the 
'before and after ;' and by virtue of such an inheritance 
is responsible for the use of it as a man, and not as 
a mere beast that feeds and sleeps. And so he thus 
replies to his own challenge : — 



FA IR Y FOLR'-L ORE. 1 89 

' Sure, he that made us with such large discourse, 
Looking before and after, gave us not 
That capability and god-like reason 
To fust in us unused.' 

But, as Trinculo says, so soon as he casts eyes on 
Caliban : ' Were I in England now, there would this 
monster make a man ; any strange beast there makes 
a man.' 

The new theory of the origin of species, after meeting 
with the wonted reception of all great discoveries, — being 
hastily and rashly condemned in its earlier stages, and 
little less hastily accepted by many so soon as the shock 
of its novel comprehensiveness had passed away, — has 
proceeded by rapid process of evolution to the hypothesis 
of the descent of man. It has found for us an ancestry 
which by its antiquity puts the line of the Conqueror to 
shame. Nor will it allow of any evasion of this pedigree. 
Only a very few years have passed since ethnologists 
were divided into monogenists and polygenists ; and 
the believer in the unity of the human race was laughed 
at for his credulity. But all that is at an end. ' If the 
races of man were descended, as supposed by some 
naturalists, from two or more distinct species, which had 
differed as much, or nearly as much, from each other, 
as the orang differs from the gorilla, it can hardly be 
doubted that marked differences in the structure of 
certain bones would still have been discoverable in man 
as he now exists.' So says Mr. Darwin ; and so his 
Caliban of evolution must needs find admission into 
our pedigree as the undoubted progenitor and sole 
Adam of the whole human race. 

The Court of Heraldry has ever been wont to assume 
an authority which admitted of no dispute. You shall 
take its pedigree, or none. It had its three kings for 



FAIRY FOLK-LORE. 



settling such matters, when England was apt to find 
one rather more than she could manage in all the rest 
of her affairs ; and our Garter King in the new Herald's 
College of science has determined a pedigree for us 
even more dogmatically than Garter, Clarencieux, and 
Norroy combined. We are ready with the admission 
that all life starts from a cell ; that the primary rule 
of embryonic development is to all appearance common 
to animal life ; that the human embryo in early stages 
is not readily discernible from that of inferior animals 
very remote from man ; and recognise the whole very 
remarkable homologous structure in man and the lower 
animals. We admit that, up to a certain stage, develop- 
ment proceeds with many striking analogies and some 
startling homologies. But what we have to complain of 
in the treatment of a question involving such far-reaching 
results is that the modern evolutionist, leading us on 
clearly, and on the whole convincingly, through many 
remarkable evidences of development and seeming 
evolution of species ; and recognising in so far the 
essential element of humanity as to push research 
beyond mere physical structure in search of intellect, 
the social virtues, and a moral sense : just at the final 
stage where the wondrous transformation is to be looked 
for on which the verdict depends, we are directed solely 
to physical evidence, as though brain, reason, mind, and 
soul, were convertible terms. 

Mind is the true standard of man. The perfection 
of form is insignificant in comparison with the living 
soul. We are not prepared to admit that the deve- 
lopment of the brain of an orang or gorilla to a perfect 
structural equality with that of man must necessarily be 
followed by a corresponding manifestation of intelligence, 
reason, and moral sense. Professor Huxley has come 



FAIRY FOLK-LORE. 



to the conclusion that man in all parts of his organisation 
differs less from the higher apes than these do from the 
lower members of the same group. Consequently, says 
the evolutionist, ' there is no justification for placing 
man in a distinct order.' But may we not also say : 
Consequently something else than mere organisation 
must determine man's place, even according to the 
classification of the naturalist ? But here it is, just at 
the all-important point on which the whole novel pedi- 
gree of humanity depends, that the needful links are 
assumed, and the supreme difficulties ignored. The 
conclusion is thus dogmatically stated : — ' Man is de- 
scended from some less highly-organised form. The 
grounds upon which this conclusion rests will never 
be shaken, for the close similarity between man and 
the lower animals in embryonic development, as well 
as in innumerable points of structure and constitution, 
both of high and of the most trifling importance — the 
rudiments which he retains, and the abnormal rever- 
sions to which he is occasionally liable, — are facts which 
cannot be disputed. They have long been known, but 
until recently they told us nothing with respect to the 
origin of man. Now, when viewed by the light of our 
knowledge of the whole organic worl'd, their meaning is 
unmistakeable. The great principle of evolution stands 
up clear and firm, when these groups of facts are 
considered in connection with others, such as the 
mutual affinities of the members of the same group, 
their geographical distribution in- past and present 
times, and their geological succession. It is incredible 
that all these facts should speak falsely. He who is not 
content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of 
Nature as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that 
man is the work of a separate act of creation.' 



FAIRY FOLK-LORE. 



1 It may be so,' said Newton ; ' there is no arguing 
against facts,' when Molyneux communicated to him 
a discovery by which he fancied he had upset the whole 
Newtonian system. But the curious thing with Newton 
himself, as the type of man regarded from an intellectual 
point of view, is that as science proceeds on that path 
on which, to apply the words of his own epitaph, 
' mathematics of his own invention have lighted the 
way,' it seems as if by intuition he had anticipated 
later discoveries at every step. Lagrange's Calculus of 
Variations, Euler's Integrals, with other more recent 
and beautiful discoveries, appear to have been already 
his own. He was wise beyond the capacity of his own 
generation ; and ' by an almost divine power of mind,' 
sounded the depths of philosophy, and revolutionised 
the world of thought. And so is it with Shakespeare. 
He was wiser even than all the requirements of that 
grand era, which was in many respects so worthy of 
him ; and, in the Caliban of his ' Tempest,' anticipates 
and satisfies the most startling problem of the nine- 
teenth century. 

In the quaint setting of that beautiful comedy, amid 
the fanciful triumphs of a spurious science that once 
had its believers, and the creatures of the elements, 
which then commanded philosophic faith : his rational 
brute appears no less consistent and truthful to the 
ideal of his art, than the Ariel or the Miranda along- 
side of which it is placed. But when the revels of the 
magician are ended, and the naturalist undertakes to 
deal with the transitional being in its relation to the 
sober realities of science and of fact, what place will he 
assign to this Caliban of fancy ; and what can we accord 
to the equally fanciful Caliban of evolution ? Is not the 
latter rather a mere Frankenstein, still inanimate, the 



FAIRY FOLK-LORE. 



counterfeit presentment of undeveloped man, with its in- 
tellectual and moral possibilities an unsolved problem ? 

Whether we study Shakespeare's harmoniously con- 
sistent embodiment of the faith of the sixteenth century 
in beings native to the strange islands of the new-found 
world ; or turn to that progenitor of man, limned so 
definitely by Mr. Darwin, so far as mere physical 
characteristics are concerned — a hairy quadruped, 
furnished with tail and pointed ears, arboreal in its 
habits, a creature which, if naturalists had then existed 
to examine it, would have been classed among the 
quadrumana, as surely us would the common, and still 
more ancient progenitor of the monkeys ; — whether, 
I say, we study the one Caliban or the other, is it less 
a creature of the imagination ; is it more a possibility 
of this world of our common humanity, than the Ariel 
of the poet's animated and embodied zephyr? 



CHAPTER XI. 

THE COMMENTATORS. 

'Some have at first for wits, then poets, pass'd; 
Turn'd critics next, and proved plain fools at last.' — Pope. 

THE labours of a Shakespearean commentator take 
a very modest and humble rank among the varied 
products of literary adventure ; and the reception they 
have met with has too frequently been such as might 
well deter any but the boldest from following in his 
steps. 

' If aught of things that here befall 
Touch a spirit among things divine,' 

it would be pleasant to think of Louis Theobald reading 
the reversal of the old sentence which doomed him to 
the literary pillory for his patient and useful critical toil. 
It had been his habit to communicate the results of his 
Shakespearean annotations to the weekly columns of 
'Mist's Journal,' and hence the allusion, erased from later 
editions of the 'Dunciad': — 

' Nor sleeps one error in its father's grave ; 
Old puns restore, lost blunders nicely seek, 
And crucify poor Shakespeare once a week.' 

Theobald's patient diligence was unquestionable, but it 
was sneered at as the mere grubbing among waste rub- 
bish of a plodding antiquary. He lived in an age when 
the amenities of literary controversy were unknown; 
and the friends of his great rival, recognising his infe- 
riority in every element of wit and fancy to the satirist 



THE CO.VJ/EXT,! TORS. 



with whom he had unhappily provoked comparison as 
a writer of verse, adopted all Pope's prejudices in refer- 
ence to his powers as a critic. Hence the disadvantage 
at which he was placed in the battle of the books which 
ensued. Warton styles him ' a cold, plodding, and 
tasteless writer and critic' But in this he confounded 
two essentially distinct elements. As a would-be poet 
and playwright Theobald undoubtedly merited the 
epithets of cold and tasteless assigned to him. As the 
claimant to the discovery of ' The Double Falsehood,' 
included as a genuine production of Shakespeare's pen, in 
his edition of the poet's works ; and then as the blushing 
confessor to the authorship of the one belauded passage 
in its text, as his own finishing touch to what he still per- 
sisted in assigning as a whole to the great dramatist : he 
takes pre-eminence among the literary forgers of the 
strange age to which he belonged. There is a touch of 
sublimity in the apt impudence of the title, as though he 
meant a bit of covert irony in his ' Double Falsehood ' ! 
As a literary era it is difficult for us now to realise all 
the strange inconsistencies of that Augustan age over 
which Pope reigned supreme. There must have seemed 
to Theobald's contemporaries and rival critics a fitness, 
and even a poetical justice, in his advancement to the 
dunce's throne, such as is lost sight of now. For nobody 
thinks of Theobald as a poet, or recalls a single line of 
his verse : unless, indeed, his own reclaimed forgery, 
' Strike up my masters,' &c, in which he was supposed 
to have added another hue to Shakespeare's rainbow ! 
But that, in spite of his promotion to that ' bad emi- 
nence,' he should now be recognised as one of the most 
judicious and even brilliant among all the Shakespearean 
commentators, is a proof of how great his merit must 
be in his own legitimate sphere. In place and point 
o 2 



196 THE COMMENTATORS. 

of time he stands, as a critic of Shakespeare, between 
Pope and the arrogant presumptuous Warburton. In 
point of merit he is the suggester of not a few in- 
genious conjectural emendations, now universally ac- 
cepted, which the author of ' The Essay on Criticism ' 
might well have envied ; while his plodding industry, 
in alliance with learning and critical discrimination, was 
sufficient to have rescued the author of ' The Divine 
Legation ' from his undisputed claim to Mallett's ' Fa- 
miliar Epistle to the Most Impudent Man living ' ! 

Bishop Warburton is a warning to all Shakespearean 
critics. Of veneration, modesty, or diffidence, he took no 
account. His aim seemed less to produce a ' Shake- 
speare restored ' than to create a remodelled Shakespeare, 
reformed from what the poet did write to what, in the 
superior judgment of his right reverend commentator, 
he should have written. Without some reverential ap- 
preciation of the genius of the author, a revision of his 
text can only lead to presumptuous impertinences ; and 
not a few of Warburton's dogmatic recensions are sheer 
nonsense, as where he declares of the line in Hamlet's 
soliloquy, 

' Or to take arms against a sea of troubles ' — 

' without question Shakespeare wrote " against assail of 
troubles," i.e. assault'; or again, in Act iii. Sc. 4, 
where Hamlet charges his mother with 

'Such an act 
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty;' 

and in the same vein proceeds to a climax, which never- 
theless leaves the act unnamed : the Queen demands 
in reply — 

' Ay me, what act, 
That roars so loud, and thunders in the index?' 



THE COMMENTA TORS. 



The sense and aptness of the last line seem obvious 
enough ; but in Warburton's hands it undergoes this 
ludicrous travesty : — 

' That roars so loud, it thunders to the Indies ! ' 

It is a warning to all who may venture where he so 
boldly trod. Yet whatever may have been the pre- 
sumptions and shortcomings of the 'critical herd,' their 
labours have removed many obscurities and blemishes 
from the Shakespearean text ; while even the assumed 
authority of an annotated 1632 folio, seemingly in a 
contemporary hand, and edited with eulogistic con- 
firmation by a veteran commentator, has failed to give 
currency to a single reading that cannot win general 
consent as a needful illumination of the original text. 

But there is one class of corrections in which, in some 
cases a happy hit, in others a felicitous acumen, has led 
to valuable elucidations with the smallest amount of 
change in the literal text. The experience of every 
author much accustomed to proof-reading, familiarises 
him with that mischievous class of misprints which sub- 
stitutes an apparent sense wholly different from the 
intended meaning. Among my own experiences in this 
way is the conversion of ' brutified savages ' into ' beauti- 
fied savages ;' or again the change of a sentence in which 
I had purposed to characterise certain plausible asser- 
tions as no better than ' clever guesses at truth' into the 
transformed statement of ' eleven guesses at truth ' ! — 
changes literally trifling, which nevertheless wholly de- 
stroyed the meaning. Shakespeare's text not only 
abounds with such ; but they go on, in certain cases, 
undergoing successive transformations in new editions, 
both by early and modern writers, until the blunder 
of a later edition is made the basis of an imaginary 



i 9 8 THE COMMENTATORS. 

restoration, very plausible at times, and yet altogether dif- 
fering from what we have the means of shewing Shake- 
speare actually did write. The temptation to the critic, 
enamoured of his work, to fancy every ingenious literal 
transformation not only an improvement, but an actual 
discovery and restoration of the text, has of course to 
be guarded against. Examples of such fallacious dis- 
coveries are plentiful. When Macbeth retorts to the 
contemptuous upbraidings of his wife that he is 

'Letting "I dare not" wait upon "I would," 
Like the poor cat i' the adage,' 

his reply is — 

' I dare do all that may become a man ; 
Who dares do more is none.' 

Whereupon Lady Macbeth asks in the same con- 
temptuous tone : — 

' What beast was't then 
That made you break this enterprise to me ? ' 

The antithesis of Lady Macbeth's beast, to what 'may 
become a man^ in her husband's exclamation, is so 
obvious and telling, that the passage might be thought 
safe from any critical tampering. But the amended 
1632 folio converts the beast into boast ; and its editor, 
Mr. John Payne Collier, goes into ecstasies over the 
happy correction of what, he says, ' reads like a gross 
vulgarism.' In similar fashion Warburton travesties 
a simile which least of all might have been supposed 
to lie beyond the appreciation of a bishop. The dis- 
consolate Rosalind, in ' As You Like It,' says of her 
absent lover, ' His kissing is as full of sanctity as the 
touch of holy bread.' So at least read the folios. But 
not so, says the clerical censor ; this is ' impious and 
absurd,' and so he converts the beautiful allusion to 



THE COMMENT A TORS. 



the holy touch of sacramental bread, into what he 
calls a ' comparison just and decent,' by rendering it 
holy beard, that is, the kiss of an holy saint or her- 
mit ' ! In my own copy of the 1632 folio, some previous 
possessor has drawn his pen through the word bread, 
and written in the margin hand: a better reading than 
the bishop's, though poor as a substitute for the original 
text. 

The editors of the ' Cambridge Shakespeare ' remark 
in their final preface : ' The more experience an editor 
has, the more cautious he will be in the introduction 
of conjectural emendations : not, assuredly, because his 
confidence in the earliest text increases, but because 
he gains a greater insight into the manifold and far 
removed sources of error. The insertions, marginal 
and interlinear, and doubtless occasional errors, of the 
author's own manuscript, the mistakes, deliberate altera- 
tions and attempted corrections of successive transcri- 
bers and of the earliest printer, result at last in 
corruptions which no conjecture can with certainty 
emend.' It is one thing, however, to actually thrust 
into the most authoritative text of Shakespeare which 
we possess, the fancies and guesses of the student ; 
another and wholly different course is to offer such 
guesses — when the results of careful and reverent study, — 
apart from the text, as hints for the consideration of 
fellow-students. In this fashion Theobald communi- 
cated his early notes to ' Mist's Journal ' ; and in our 
own day many a useful hint has been contributed to 
the columns of 'The Athenaeum,' 'Notes and Queries,' 
or other literary periodicals. 

In previous chapters certain of Shakespeare's dramas 
have been carefully reviewed under special aspects, 
and brought to bear on some points of interest in a 



THE COMMENTATORS. 



novel field of criticism. As it has been my habit as 
a student of Shakespeare to note, from time to time, 
such conjectural emendations as occurred to me in the 
course of my reading, I venture to cull from these the 
notes on the text of the two comedies which have 
been chiefly referred to in the previous discussion. 
The principle is a sound one which admits no con- 
jectural emendations into the text because they seem 
to make better rhythm, grammar, or sense, so long as 
the reading of the folio is a possible one. Were the 
prosaic rendering of Dame Quickly's description of 
Falstaff's death, as given in the marginal notes of 
Collier's 1632 folio, actually in the printed text, we 
should feel compelled to accept it in lieu of Theo- 
bald's felicitous suggestion, ' For his nose was as sharp 
as a pen, and a babbled of green fields.' But when 
the text actually reads, 'and a table of greene fields,' 
it is so obviously blundered that we are free to accept 
any good suggestion ; and few indeed are likely to 
hesitate between Theobald's happy thought, and the 
poor commonplace of the unknown annotator : ' for his 
nose was as sharp as a pen on a table of green 
frieze.' 

The case is reversed in another example of conjec- 
tural emendation. In 'The Taming of the Shrew,' 
Tranio says : — ■ 

' Let 's be no stoics, nor no stocks, I pray ; 
Or so devote to Aristotle's checks 
As Ovid be an outcast quite abjured; 
Balk logic with acquaintance that you have, 
And practice rhetoric in your common talk.' 

Rowe converts balk logic into talk logic ; while Capel, 
and an anonymous critic quoted in the Cambridge 
notes, respectively suggest chop and hack. But we 



THE COMMENTA TORS. 



owe to Blackstone the happy thought of converting 
Aristotle's checks into Aristotle s e thicks. ' Ethics ' comes 
in so fittingly, along with logic and rhetoric, and the 
argument so obviously is — 'Do not let us so austerely 
devote ourselves to philosophy as wholly to abjure 
love,' that the emendation seems one that might be 
welcomed by the most cautious editor. But checks 
makes good sense ; and as it is found both in the 
folios and quarto, it is retained in the text of the 
Cambridge edition ; while Blackstone's conjecture takes 
its place as a foot-note. 

This is at once the safe and true course. All such 
changes are open to diversity of opinion. The text of the 
folios, supplemented in certain cases by the quartos, 
excepting where the language is notoriously corrupt 
and meaningless, is the only authoritative one we can 
ever hope to appeal to ; or at .any rate must ever be 
of higher authority than any mere conjectural emen- 
dation. Nevertheless it may be thought at times that 
the Cambridge editors have carried their conservative 
adherence to the earliest text to an extreme : as 
where in ' A Midsummer Night's Dream,' a line in Ly- 
sander's well-known commentary on ' The course of 
true love,' is printed after the quartos, thus : — 

' Making it momentany as a sound, 
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream ; ' 

though the folios render the word momentarie. Where 
so obvious a choice lay before them, the later text of 
the folio might safely be followed. The sole legiti- 
mate aim of the Shakespearean editor is to restore, and 
if needs be, to explain, but not to amend the actual 
text ; to give, as far as possible, what Shakespeare 
did write, not to assume a censorship on his writings 



THE COMMENTATORS. 



which would be presumptuous when dealing with far 
inferior authors. 

Much of Pope's, as of Steevens' emendations of the 
metre of Shakespeare partakes of the censorial cha- 
racter. -No two things professing to be the same could 
differ more widely than the heroic measure of Shake- 
speare and of Pope. The structure of Shakespeare's 
verse is strictly dramatic, prosody and all else being 
subordinated to the higher purposes of the dialogue. He 
displaced the rhyming couplets of the early drama ; 
and, following in the wake of ' Marlow's mighty line,' 
he constructed a free dramatic versification, partaking 
of the licence derived from the Old English deca- 
syllabics of Chaucer. Where the sense is better ex- 
pressed by such means, the line frequently begins with 
an accent, making thereby the first foot a trochee 
instead of an iambus. A still more impressive effect 
is produced by adding on to the beginning of a full 
heroic line an extra emphatic syllable. Some editors 
adopt the plan of printing this in a line by itself ; as is 
done with the numerous half-lines purposely introduced. 
Marked pauses of different kinds break the monotony of 
a succession of heroic lines, and give pleasing irregu- 
larity and naturalness to the dialogue. In some cases 
the line is broken by the sense into two distinct parts, 
with an extra syllable at the break, so as to compel 
a pause in the voice. In others an unaccented syllable 
is omitted, so that the voice rests on the final accent 
preceding the caesura, before starting on the first accent 
of the second half. Lines of twelve syllables are com- 
mon, both with and without an accent in the super- 
fluous syllables. An occasional verse occurs even with 
two additional feet, while others frequently want a 
foot. The licence of slurring or suppressing syllables 



THE COMMENTATORS. 203 

is used to an extent which could not now be indulged 
in. Prose and verse intermingle, according to the sub- 
ject, and the character of the speaker. A dialogue 
begins at times in prose, as in Act i. Sc. 3. of ' The 
Merchant of Venice,' where Shylock and Bassanio dis- 
cuss the prosaic piece of business concerning the three- 
months' interest for three thousand ducats ; but the 
moment that the entrance of Antonio awakens the jealous 
hatred of Shylock, the language becomes impassioned 
and metrical. Falstaff never speaks in verse but in 
his mock heroics, as where, in ' Henry IV (Part II. Act 
ii. Sc. 4.) he plays the royal father to the prince, and 
' will do it in King Cambyses' vein ; ' or again, where 
in loftiest fashion he addresses the new king, Henry V, 
with the purpose of showing Master Shallow how he can 
make ' King Hal ' do him grace. The prince, on the 
contrary, passes from prose to verse, according as he 
condescends to the society of his boon companions, or 
unveils the traits of a noble nature, and gives expres- 
sion to his higher emotions. Even so in ' The Tempest,' 
Caliban, though rude, is never prosaic ; and except in 
the mere exchange of question and answer with Ste- 
phano and Trinculo, he speaks in verse, while they and 
the rude sailors are absolutely restricted to prose. 

The rhythmical effect of varying pauses gives further 
variety to Shakespeare's dramatic verse ; and additional 
freedom is secured by the frequent use of the hemistich, 
or imperfect line, not only at the end but in the middle 
of a speech. By such means particular passages are 
rendered more emphatic, and a natural ease is given to 
the language of dialogue, while retaining the elevated 
dignity which pertains to the measured structure of 
verse. Shakespeare in fact subordinates the sound to 
the sense, as he adapts the language to the character 



2o 4 THE COMMENTATORS. 

of the speaker. The rhythm is made in each case to 
respond to the exigencies of the dialogue, instead of 
forcing every variety of utterance to subject itself to 
the same artificial constraints of verse. The editors of 
the Cambridge Shakespeare remark, in reference to 
certain imperfect lines in ' The Tempest,' ' The truth 
is that in dialogue Shakespeare's language passes so 
rapidly from verse to prose and from prose to verse, 
sometimes even hovering, as it were, over the confines, 
being rhythmical rather than metrical, that all attempts 
to give regularity to the metre must be made with 
diffidence and received with doubt' 

Of all this, however, Pope, and the successors of his 
school who undertook the textual criticism of Shake- 
speare, had not the slightest appreciation. They dealt 
with him as an author of a ruder age than their own. 
Hanmer is more irreverent than Pope in the censorship 
exercised over the poet's metres ; and as to Warburton, 
who subsequently united his labours with those of the 
author of ' The Dunciad,' as a joint effort for the restora- 
tion of the genuine text : he coolly sets them forth as the 
fruits of his younger pastimes, when he ' used to turn 
over those sort of writers to unbend himself from more 
serious applications ! ' From such irreverent critics little 
that was good, and nothing that was trustworthy in 
the form of literary criticism, was to be looked for. But 
the condition of the text both in the quartos and folios 
invited to metrical reconstruction, for many passages of 
verse are there printed as prose. Guided by the arti- 
ficial standard of their day, their vain efforts to force 
the measure of Shakespeare into the Procrustean bed of 
their heroic pentameters, tempt them to endless cobbling. 
Short lines are eked out with an added syllable, long 
ones are abbreviated, by elision, by omission, or change 



THE COMMENT A TORS. 



of words ; and after all, the baffled critics find that the 
' native wood-notes wild ' will not be constrained within 
their prescribed bounds. The increasing study of the 
elder poets, along with a truer appreciation of Shake- 
speare himself, as well as the familiarity with a freer line 
in the practice of our living poets, all combine to induce 
a juster estimation of the versification of the Elizabethan 
drama. 

Amongst other progressive features in the develop- 
ment of Shakespeare's genius, certain characteristics of 
his verse clearly distinguish the earliest from some at 
least of his later dramas ; and have an interest for us 
here as adding further confirmation to the idea that the 
literary executors of the poet took the virgin manuscript 
of ' The Tempest ' fresh from its author's pen, and placed 
it foremost in the collected works of their deceased 
friend. The Rev. Joseph Hunter, in his ' Disquisition on 
the Scene, Origin, Date, etc. of Shakespeare's Tempest,' 
enters into an elaborate argument to prove that ' The 
Tempest' is not only not Shakespeare's last work, but 
he aims from internal and other evidence at fixing the 
year 1596 as the date of its production. He indeed 
claims it to be the actual 'Love's Labour's Won' of 
Meres' ' Palladis Tamia, Wit's Treasury,' published in 
1598, in which that writer commends Shakespeare as 
the most excellent among the English, alike for comedy 
and tragedy ; and, enumerating certain comedies in 
proof of this, he names his ' Gentlemen of Verona,' his 
' Errors,' his ' Love Labours Lost,' his ' Love Labours 
Won,' his ' Midsummer Night's Dream,' and his 'Merchant 
of Venice.' Dr. Farmer "imagined that the 'All's Well 
that Ends Well ' is the play referred to. In reality there 
is no evidence, beyond such fancied fitness of the title to 
one or other of his known comedies, as may readily 



THE COMMENTATORS. 



enough be assumed in the love's labour won of more 
than one of their plots. 

The precise date of the production of 'The Tempest' 
is not a question of any moment in reference to the 
points chiefly discussed here ; and indeed the attempts 
hitherto made to determine the order of production of 
Shakespeare's dramas from internal evidence have ended 
in very conflicting results. But it is worthy of note in 
reference to the verse of ' The Tempest,' that it bears a 
striking resemblance in one notable characteristic to that 
of ' Coriolanus,' another of the plays which appeared for 
the first time in the 1623 folio, and which is recognised 
on all hands as among the later productions of the 
poet's pen. It is indeed named by Mr. Joseph Hunter 
along with three, or possibly four others, of his latest 
plays, written when in his maturity 'his muse grew 
severe.' Professor Craik, in his ' English of Shakespeare,' 
dwells on the peculiarity now referred to, as a habit of 
versification very sparingly introduced in the earliest 
plays, and which seemed to grow upon the poet in his 
later works. This is the termination of the line on the 
tenth syllable, where ordinarily the true stress and most 
marked accent should be found, with a slight unemphatic 
monosyllable. Not only has this a certain unexpected 
effect, by the absence of that rest and dwelling on the 
syllable which the normal rhythm of the verse leads us 
to anticipate ; but this effect is further heightened, and 
indeed owes its chief force, to the use generally of 
relative or conjunctive monosyllables, such as and, have, 
that, with, for, is, &c, words which lead mind and voice 
alike onward to the succeeding line. The effect is in some 
degree startling from the absence of the expected rest ; 
but its true value lies in the increasing variety and flow 
of language, and the additional freedom of structure, in 



THE COMMENTATORS. 207 

which dramatic verse legitimately deviates from the more 
stately epic. In this respect Shakespeare's first produc- 
tions differed from those of earlier English dramatists ; 
and the whole tendency of his mind was towards further 
change in the same direction. Professor Craik remarks 
of this specialty, 'it is a point of style which admits of 
precise appreciation to a degree much beyond most 
others ; and there is no other single indication which 
can be compared with it as an element in determining 
the chronology of the plays.' It seems somewhat in- 
consistent with his idea that examples of this unemphatic 
tenth syllable are so rare in the 'Julius Caesar,' that he 
cites seven as the whole which occur in that play. He 
does indeed use it as an argument for assigning an 
earlier date to this latter play than to the ' Coriolanus ' ; 
but the 'Julius Caesar' is one of those which appears 
for the first time in the posthumous folio ; and whatever 
its precise place may be in the chronological order of the 
plays, it certainly is not an early production. 

Before citing from 'The Tempest' examples of this 
characteristic peculiarity of verse, it may be well to note 
that it is not to be confounded with the universal licence 
of ending a heroic line with the -If, -ing, -ucss, or other 
like termination of a large class of* words ; though more 
frequently this constitutes in Shakespeare's verse an extra 
unemphatic syllable following the fifth accent. In this, 
as in all other prolongations of the line beyond the final 
accent, the effect is to give richness and variety without 
interfering with the rhythmical pause at the end of the 
line. Below are a few instances of the kind of verse 
referred to, as it occurs in ' The Tempest.' The opening 
line of the second scene is one not of ten but twelve 
syllables, but it illustrates the peculiar effect resulting 
from the closing of a line with an auxiliary verb, con- 



THE COMMENTATORS. 



stituting by grammatical structure a part of the verb with 
which the next line begins. In this respect it has some 
analogy to the terminating a line, and rinding a rhyme, 
in the middle of a word : which, though now employed 
only as the extreme licence of burlesque extravaganzas, 
was used by Spenser in the mottoes of his 'Faerie 
Queen,' e. g. 

' The Redcross Knight is captive made, 
By gyaunt proud opprest ; 
Prince Arthure meets with Una great- 
ly with those newes distrest.' 

If the student of Shakespeare whose attention has not 
been hitherto called to this peculiarity in the verse of 
'The Tempest,' compare it in this respect with the 
known early works of the dramatist, such as his ' Romeo 
and Juliet,' 'Love's Labour's Lost,' and 'A Midsummer 
Night's Dream,' he will perceive that it is a very notice- 
able characteristic of a change in the rhythmical structure 
of his dramatic dialogue, unquestionably pertaining to 
the latest structure of his heroic line, as in the following 
examples : — 

' If by your art, my dearest father, you have 
Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.' 

'It should the good ship so have swallow'd, and 
The fraughting souls within her.' 

' Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and 
She said thou wast my daughter.' 

'I pray thee mark me, that a brother should 
Be so perfidious.' 

' Some food we had, and some fresh water, that 
A noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo, 
Out of his charity, who being then appointed 
Master of this design, did give us with 
Rich garments.' 

' From mine own library with volumes that 
I prize above my dukedom.' 



THE COMMENT A TORS. 



!0 9 



* A freckled whelp, hag-bom, not honour'd with 
A human shape.' 

' Would'st give me 
Water with berries in't; and teach me how 
To name the bigger light, and how the less. 

' "When thou didst not, savage, 
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like 
A thing most brutish.' 

'Why speaks my father so ungently? This 
Is the third man that ere I saw.' 

'I will resist such entertainment, till 
Mine enemy has more power.' 

These examples, all culled from a single scene, abun- 
dantly suffice to illustrate the use of this peculiar metrical 
licence throughout 'The Tempest.' In no case does 
the final monosyllable admit of a rhetorical accent ; 
unless possibly in the eighth: — 'and teach me how To 
name the bigger light,' &c. But even here it is rather 
the habit of resting on the tenth syllable, than the 
meaning or structure of the sentence, that would sug- 
gest an accent; for indeed this is one of t the numerous 
specimens of dramatic dialogue specially adapted to the 
character of the speaker, and which might be treated 
as rhythmical prose. 'When thou earnest first thou 
strokedst me and madest much of me ; wouldst give 
me water with berries in't, and teach me how to name 
the bigger light, and how the less, that burn by day and 
night : and then I loved thee.' In all the other examples 
the line terminates with a word on which the voice 
cannot dwell without doing violence to the sense ; and 
hence the unemphatic break, with the necessity of 
passing on to the next line, gives a novel variety and 
freedom to passages of the dialogue. 

Of an opposite class of lines referred to above, in 
which the line is broken, both by sense and metrical 
P 



THE COMMENTATORS. 



structure, into two parts, by the omission of an un- 
accented syllable, the introduction of an extra syllable, 
or the bringing of two accents together, so as to compel 
the voice to rest between the one and the other, and so 
make the first emphatic, examples abound in 'The 
Tempest' Of these a few may be quoted. 

'But that the sea, mounting to the welkin's cheek, 
Dashes the fire out. O, I have suffered 
With those that I saw suffer !'— i. 2. 

' Obey, and be attentive. Canst thou remember 
A time before we came unto this cell?' — i. 1. 

'And executing the outward face of royalty 
With all prerogative. Hence his ambition growing.' — i. 2. 

' We are such stuff 
As dreams are made on, and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vex'd.' — iv. 1. 

' Who most strangely 
Upon this shore, where you were wreck'd, was landed 
To be the Lord on't. No more yet of this.' — v. i. 

In both the characteristics specially illustrated in the 
above examples, as well as in the general structure of 
its verse, ' The Tempest ' is distinguished from ' A Mid- 
summer Night's Dream.' Much of the dialogue in the 
latter is in rhyming couplets, and the regularity and 
prevailing uniformity of its measure recall the verse 
of the 'Venus and Adonis' or others of the first heirs 
of the poet's invention. Whatever be the precise date 
of 'The Tempest' it is not to be doubted that those 
two comedies so much akin in the fanciful originality of 
their dramatis persona, and the rich imaginative luxu- 
riance of their verse, belong in point of time to two 
widely separated eras of the poet's literary life. 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE FOLIOS. 

' Prospero. So of his gentleness, 

Knowing I loved my books, he furnish'd me 
From mine own library with volumes Tbat 
I prize above my dukedom.' — The Tempest. 

THE first folio of Shakespeare, which issued from 
the press in 1623, seven years after the poet's 
death, is the first complete and authorised collection 
of Shakespeare's dramas, — complete, with the one ex- 
ception of ' Pericles, Prince of Tyre.' It is a handsomely 
printed volume, issued with all accompaniments which, 
according to the fashion of that age, could give eclat 
to such a literary monument of genius. One half of his- 
dramatic works, and some of these among the very best, 
such as : — ' Cymbeline,' ' Macbeth,' ' Measure for Mea- 
sure,' ' The Tempest,' ' Julius Caesar, ' Antony and 
Cleopatra,' ' Coriolanus,' 'King John,' and ' Henry VIII,' 
appeared there for the first time in print. The preface 
shows that its joint editors, John Heminge and Henry 
Condell, were actuated by all loving veneration for 
their deceased friend ; and when they there declare that 
those plays which had already appeared in print 'are 
now offer'd to view cured and perfect of their limbs: 
and all the rest, absolute in their numbers as he con- 
ceived them,' it is not to be doubted that they honestly 
believed what they affirmed. They were actors, not 
authors ; and apparently regarded the printer's share of 
the work as a thing with which they had nothing to do. 



THE FOLIOS. 



' It had beene a thing, we confesse, worthy to have 
beene wished, that the Author himselfe, had liv'd to 
have set forth, and overseene his owne writings. But 
since it hath been ordain'd otherwise, and he by death 
departed from that right, we pray you doe not envy his 
Friends, the office of their care and paine, to have col- 
lected and publish'd them.' So say the poet's literary 
executors in reference to their labour of love. They 
had, we may presume, obtained possession of all the 
manuscripts left by Shakespeare at his death ; had 
added to these the original manuscripts, or copies of 
others, in the Blackfriars or Globe stage-libraries ; and 
completed the series, as the text abundantly proves, 
by means of some of the very quartos which they 
denounce in their preface as ' stolne and surreptitious 
copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths 
of injurious impostors.' But all proof-reading was evi- 
dently left to the printers ; and wild work they have 
made of it, as many an obscure or absolutely meaning- 
less passage shews ! 

It has been a favourite idea of Shakespeare's com- 
mentators that the folios supply, on the whole, an 
authoritative critical text of Shakespeare ; and unques- 
tionably, as the earliest edition of the collected plays, and 
the sole original text for one half of them, the first folio 
must constitute the basis of all texts of the plays. Again, 
there is no doubt that the second, or 1632 folio, is cor- 
rected to some small extent from the first, though also 
it introduces blunders of its own. Yet it is, upon the 
whole, the highest authority where no quartos exist ; 
and it is on the margins of a copy of this edition that 
the manuscript notes of Mr. J. P. Collier's famous text 
occur. It is not necessary to enter here on the vexed 
question of the genuineness or value of these notes. 



THE FOLIOS. 



But it will suffice to shew to how very limited an 
extent the original text of the folio can be relied upon, 
when it is remembered that the correction of minor 
errors alone in this annotated copy are estimated by its 
editor at twenty thousand. Many of these are palpable 
blunders in spelling, punctuation, or such manifest trans- 
position of letters or words as could scarcely escape 
the eye of the first corrector, and had already been 
amended by Rowe, Pope, Theobald, and other editors. 
But besides those, the volume abounds in every kind 
of error of omission or commission. The dialogue is 
misplaced as to speakers, in part or whole. Verse is 
printed as prose, and prose as verse. Words are 
blundered and displaced, lines are transposed, words, 
and it is believed whole lines, have been dropped out. 
Sentences are cut in two by periods and capitals : 
making in some cases a sort of bungling sense utterly 
mystifying to the reader ; as in a well-known instance 
in ' Henry VIII,' Act iv. Sc. 2, where Griffith, speaking 
her best for the dead cardinal, says, according to the 
folios : — 

' This Cardinal, 
Though from a humble stock, undoubtedly 
Was fashioned to much honour. From his cradle 
He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one.' 

To Theobald is due the simple but effective transpo- 
sition of the periods which reconverted the plausible 
nonsense of the printer into the true sense of the poet, 
reading thus : — 

'This Cardinal, 
Though from a humble stock, undoubtedly 
Was fashioned to much honour from his cradle. 
He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one ; 
Exceeding wise, fair-spoken and persuading.' 

This being the condition of the best text we have to 
appeal to, with such aid as the traduced quartos supply 



2i 4 THE FOLIOS. 



for collation and correction of the folio misprints of 
one half of the plays, it is obvious that abundant room 
is left for the labours of the commentators. Their work 
began in 1709, with the revised and corrected edition 
of Shakespeare's plays by Nicholas Rowe, the first 
attempt at a critical restoration of the text. A host 
of zealous, if not always judicious critics have followed 
in his steps. Poets, antiquaries, and scholars have 
rivalled one another in the search for blemishes, and 
exhausted their ingenuity in attempts to remove them. 
Their joint labours and rival criticisms have accom- 
plished much which is valuable. Yet even now, after 
a century and a half devoted to such efforts, it cannot 
be assumed that all has been done that patient diligence 
and sagacity may hope to achieve. There are, doubt- 
less, corruptions which no conjecture can with certainty 
remove ; for even when the intelligent student is able 
to offer a substitute for some meaningless- phrase, which 
illuminates the whole passage, it lies beyond possibility 
of proof that this is what Shakespeare actually wrote. 
But while a becoming reverence for the poet will re- 
strain the most critical editor from unduly tampering 
with the text, it need not preclude the most modest 
student from communicating the results of his labours. 
Any even plausible amendment of an obscure passage 
may find admission into a foot-note, and be there left 
to the judgment of the reader as a possible suggestion 
or elucidation. Amendments in themselves inadmissible 
have repeatedly suggested others of value ; and, even 
when rejected as worthless, by tempting the reader to 
renewed study, they often reward him with more com- 
prehensive appreciation of the meaning of the original 
text. In this sense alone are the following notes and 
conjectural emendations put forth. 



THE FOLIOS. 



In general accuracy the text of ' The Tempest ' com- 
pares favourably with most of the plays in the first or 
second folios ; and as it appeared in the former of these 
for the first time, it is not improbable that it may have 
been printed as already suggested, from the author's own 
manuscript. But from the little we know of Shake- 
speare's handwriting, it may be assumed that it was 
not of the most readable character ; and proof-reading 
seems to have been carried on in the seventeenth century 
under little or no editorial oversight, in a fashion which 
admitted of very strange misprints passing muster in the 
text. In truth the 1623 folio may be pronounced with- 
out hesitation to be one of the handsomest and worst 
printed books that issued from the press in the whole 
century. The persevering efforts to restore a pure 
text have not been expended without a fair per- 
centage of very happy results. Sometimes by the mere 
change of a single letter sense has been found in what 
was before meaningless, and Shakespeare's own text, 
we can scarcely doubt, restored. That many textual 
imperfections still remain is not to be doubted. The 
majority of these, however, lie beyond the reach of any 
such certainty of correction, since the hand of the 
master has been, not merely blurred, but defaced be- 
yond all decypherment by some careless blunderer. Yet 
even with them carefully studied conjectural criticism 
may still find room left for useful work : not indeed by 
tampering with the text, but by supplementing it with 
suggestive notes, which may at times restore the mean- 
ing, even if it leave doubtful the actual words of the 
great master, 'whose mind and hand went together.' 
The severe critical test to which every such suggestion 
is certain to be subjected, is a sure guarantee that no 
merely plausible change will secure general acceptance ; 



THE FOLIOS. 



though where the text has been blundered into absolute 
meaninglessness, any sense is better than none. 

In reference to 'The Tempest,' the version of it as 
revised by Dryden and D'Avenant has a certain value 
textually, though worthless in a literary point of view. 
Dryden was born only fifteen years after the death of 
Shakespeare at the comparatively early age of fifty-two. 
As to D'Avenant, a scandal of the time reputed him to 
be a son of the great dramatist. To such men, inti- 
mately acquainted with all the traditions of the stage, 
and to whom the language of Shakespeare 'was no less 
familiar in its colloquial freedom, than in its choicest 
phraseology, the correction of a misprint, or the sub- 
stitution of a more intelligible or expressive word for 
a doubtful one, could be done with a confidence per- 
taining now alone to the diligent student of the Eliza- 
bethan literature. Yet, as we shall have occasion to note, 
the language was even then undergoing rapid change, 
and Dryden kept no critical eye on the points in which 
the usage of his own day already differed from that of 
the Elizabethan age. Rowe, Pope, and others of the 
earliest commentators, availed themselves of Dryden's 
amendments on the folio text, and some of them have 
been generally adopted. To him we owe the arrange- 
ment of portions, such as the talk of Caliban, into verse, 
in lieu of the prose of the folios. Of his verbal amend- 
ments an example may be quoted, where Caliban ex- 
claims, on the entrance of Trinculo, according to the 
folio : — 

' Lo, now, lo ! 
Here comes a spirit of his, and to torment me.' 

Pope reads ' now to torment me,' thinking perhaps the 
repetition of the now, as of the lo, characteristic. 
Dryden had already rendered it ' sent to torment me.' 



THE FOLIOS. 



In similar points, more particularly noted hereafter, 
changes are due to Dryden's revision, but they are not 
of great importance, and some of them are not improve- 
ments. In the same scene, for example, Prospero, in 
describing to his daughter his brother's treachery, says — 

' Whereon 
A treacherous army levied, one midnight 
Fated to the purpose, did Antonio open 
The gates of Milan.' 

The idea manifestly is, that on that fatal or fated night 
Antonio accomplished his treacherous deed ; and, as 
Prospero proceeds to say, 

' I' the dead of darkness 
The ministers for the purpose hurried thence 
Me and they crying self.' 

But Dryden feebly substitutes mated for fated. Other 
emendations and suggestions will help to illustrate the 
condition of the text. Prospero, having narrated to his 
daughter the treacherous proceedings of his uncle, adds 
thus : — 

' Mark his condition and the event ; then tell me 
If this might be a brother ; ' 

to which, according to the appropriation of the dialogue 
in the folios, Miranda replies : — 

' I should sin 
To think but nobly of my grandmother: 
Good wombs have borne bad sons.' 

Theobald proposed the transference of the last line to 
Prospero, as more consistent with the previous dialogue, 
and with the age and innocent simplicity of Miranda, 
as shown e. g. in the preceding interrogative : e Sir, are 
not you my father ?' along with his response. When he 
describes their hurried banishment from Milan, he tells 
her, according to the original text — which may be given 



THE FOLIOS. 



here, with orthography, capitals, and punctuation, as a 
sample of that of the folio : — 

' In few, they hurried us a-boord a Barke, 
Bore us some Leagues to Sea, where they prepared 
A rotten carkasse of a Butt, not rigg'd, 
Nor tackle, nor sayle, nor mast ; the very rats 
Instinctiuely have quit it.' 

The Butt of the third line is rendered boat by Dryden, 
and in this he is followed by Rowe. The Cambridge 
editors, usually so conservative, adopt the alteration. 
Mr. Joseph Hunter, on the contrary, argues for a literal 
wine-butt cut in two, in spite of the inconsistency of 
its desertion by the rats ; while Knight retains the butt 
as, at least, more strikingly conveying the idea of a 
vessel even less secure than the most rotten boat : as 
it is common enough now to speak of a poor, ill- 
appointed vessel as a tub. The ' nor sayle' of the fourth 
line is a reading in which the second folio varies from 
the first ; and most editors adhere to the latter as equally 
indisputable in metre and sense ; but Mr. Joseph Hunter 
thinks ' the second nor is added to the reading of the 
first folio, to the improvement of the spirit.' It is an 
illustration of much else of the same kind ; for here a 
learned and most critical commentator adopts, I cannot 
doubt, a mere compositor's blunder, and finds in it the 
essence of Shakespeare's verse. Another example of 
doubtful appropriation of the dialogue occurs in the 
same scene. Prospero having described the services 
rendered to him at the last by Gonzalo, the speakers 
thus proceed, according to the folios : — 

'Mir. Would I might 

But ever see that man ! 

Pros. Now I arise : 

Sit still, and hear the last of our sea sorrow.' 



THE FOLIOS. 



After the ' now I arise ' of Prospero, the stage direction, 
' Resumes his mantle] has been added by Rowe and 
later editors. Collier's MS. notes render it ' Put on robe 
again'' ; but Blackstone regards the 'now I arise' as a 
part of Miranda's remark, as though conceiving she has 
heard all her father has to tell her ; and to this he 
naturally responds ' sit still,' &c. Another example of 
the original text will suffice to illustrate the orthography 
and punctuation, in the slovenly fashion in which it re- 
mains uncorrected in the second folio, where Ariel tells 
Prospero, 

'Not a soule 
But felt a Feaver of the madde, and plaid 
Some trickes of disperation ; all but Mariners 
Plung'd in the foaming bryne, and quit the vessell ; 
Then all a fire with me the Kings sonne Ferdinand, 
With hairfe up-staring (then like reeds, not haire) 
Was the first man that leapt; cride hell is empty, 
And all the Divells are heere.' 

Dryden here changes the text to ' a fever of the mind,' 
and is followed in this by Pope ; but the best later 
editors retain it unchanged further than the indis- 
pensable correction of the punctuation. Again, Prospero, 
according to the folio, addresses Caliban thus : — 

'Thou most lying slave, 
Whom stripes may move, nor kindness !' 

The substitution of not for nor by modern editors seems 
to me a weakening of the text. Caliban is neither 
moved by stripes nor kindness to any good purpose, in 
Prospero's estimation. The address to him immediately 
following, in the same vituperative style, beginning 
' Abhorred slave,' is assigned in the folios to Miranda, 
but modern editors have followed Dryden in transfer- 
ring it to Prospero, of the correctness of which there 



THE FOLIOS. 



is no doubt. In this passage Prospero says, according 

to the folio : — 

' When thou didst not (sauage) 
Know thine owne meaning; but wouldst gabble, like 
A thing most brutish, I endow'd thy purposes 
With words that made them knowne: But thy vild race 
(Tho thou didst learn) had that in't, which good natures 
Could not abide to be with,' &c. 

Vild is rendered vile, without the Cambridge editors 
thinking it necessary to note the change. It agrees 
with the ' abhorred slave,' &c, of the opening part of 
the sentence, but wild would accord as well, in some 
respects, with the immediate context. It may be worth 
noting here a similar misprint in ' A Midsummer 
Night's Dream,' Act i. Sc. i, where, according to the 
second folio, Helena, speaking of Demetrius, says — 

' So I, admiring of his qualities : 
Things base and vilde, holding no quantity, 
Love can transpose to forme and dignity.' 

Here Knight reads ' base and vild,' explaining the word 
in a foot-note as vile. No commentator, so far as I am 
aware, has suggested another change, which appears to 
me worthy of consideration, and may as well be noted 
now as later, viz. quality for quantity. I may notice 
here also an example of the way in which the blunders 
of one edition are liable to be made the basis of 
false emendations in another. In Act i. Sc. 2, where 
Prospero suddenly changes his manner towards Fer- 
dinand, ' lest too light winning make the prize light,' 
Miranda demands, appealingly, 'Why speaks my father 
so ungently?' but this, by a misprint in the second 
folio, becomes urgently ; and some former possessor of 
my copy has drawn his pen through it, and written in 
the margin grudgingly. The paucity of stage directions 
is another evidence of the absence of proper editorial 



THE FOLIOS. 



oversight in the folios, as where, in Act i. Sc. I, 
Prospero says — 

' It works : come on, 

Thou hast done well, fine Ariel : follow me. 

Hark what thou else shalt do me.' 

So it is printed in the folio, whereas the context clearly 
shews that the first two words are an aside, — Prospero's 
thought uttered audibly. The two commands, ' come 
on,' and ' follow me,' are addressed to Ferdinand, the 
rest is for Ariel. Two alterations on Ariel's song were 
made by Theobald, and have taken their place in the 
current text, though neither is justified by any ob- 
scurity in the original. He reads, ' Where the bee sucks 
there lurk I,' instead of ' suck I,' and ' After sunset 
merrily,' instead of summer, or, as it is in the folio 
sommer. The associations with the fine music of Dr. 
Arne have so familiarised all with the altered version ; 
and both in sound, and in association with the bat's wing, 
there is such an aptness in the latter change, that the 
restored text is apt to be felt unacceptable at first. But 
on any principle of sound criticism this seems an 
attempt to change, so far as we know, what Shakespeare 
did write, into what he ought to have written. 

The following are the results of the author's own 
reading and annotation of the two plays specially re- 
ferred to. They are by no means produced as undoubted 
emendations of the text, but merely as the conjectures 
of a Shakespeare student, on points which are for the 
most part admittedly doubtful or obscure. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

NOTES ON 'THE TEMPEST.' 

' The best in this kind are but shadows ; and the worst are no worse 
if imagination amend them.' — A Midsummer Night's Dream. 

THE sole authority for the text of 'The Tempest' is 
the 1623 folio, with whatever editorial supervision 
or appeal to an original manuscript may be supposed 
to have guided the revisers of the second and subse- 
quent folios. The text is, on the whole, free from gross 
blunders, and much more correct than other plays in the 
volume ; but obscurities and undoubted errors do exist, 
with some of which the following notes attempt to deal 
conjecturally. 



ACT I. Scene I. 

The rough dialogue of the first scene is purposely 
constructed in striking contrast to what follows, and is 
less open to rigid criticism. But Mr. Richard Grant 
White has not thought even the ' Boson,' or ' Boatswain,' 
undeserving of note in his ' Shakespeare's Scholar.' Fol- 
lowing his example, a trifling change may be noted as 
perhaps admissible in the Boatswain's words : ' Bring 
her to try with main-course.' In the folio it is printed 
' bring her to Try with Maine-course.' The capital 
suggests this as possibly the true reading : ' Bring her 
too. Try with main course.' 



A'OTES ON ' THE TEMPEST.' 



Scene II. 

' Pros. Being once perfected how to grant suits, 
How to deny them ; whom to advance, and whom 
To trash for overtopping.' 

Knight explains trash as 'a term still in use among 
hunters, to denote a piece of leather, couples, or any 
other weight, fastened round the neck of a dog, when 
his speed is superior to the rest of the pack ; i. e. when 
he overtops them, when he hunts too quick.' This in- 
terpretation seems more like an afterthought, devised to 
make the explanation fit on to the text. The meaning 
seems rather that the crafty deputy had learned how 
to grant and how to deny suits ; whom to promote and 
whom to overtop, i. e. over whom to promote others, his 
own creatures. The only other example of the use of 
the latter word is where, in ' Antony and Cleopatra,' 
Antony exclaims, ' All is lost,' and then adds, ' this pine 
is barked that overtopped them all.' This is in ac- 
cordance with the use ascribed to it in Prospero's allusion. 
As to the doubtful word trash, it is repeatedly used by 
Shakespeare in its ordinary sense of worthless. But 
in one passage in which, as usually rendered, Knight's 
interpretation of its special significance in 'The Tempest' 
seems borne out, he finds an entirely new meaning for 
it. In ' Othello,' Act ii. Sc. I, where Iago is meditating 
his purposed use of Cassio's name to awaken in the 
Moor his fatal jealousy, he exclaims, according to the 
Cambridge, as well as earlier texts : — 

' Which thing to do, 
If this poor trash of Venice, whom I trash 
For his quick hunting, stand the putting on, 
I'll have our Michael Cassio on the hip.' 

In reality, however, the use of the same word in two 



224 NOTES ON ' THE TEMPEST' 

totally different senses is the work of the commentators. 
The first quarto has crush in place of the latter trash; 
while the second and third quartos and the folios have 
trace. Knight accordingly, adopting the latter reading, 
adds this note : ' The noun trash, and the verb trace, are 
used with perfect propriety. The trash is the thing traced, 
put in traces, confined — as an untrained worthless dog 
is held ; and hence the present meaning of trash" This 
is not the only case where Knight seems to fit a meaning 
for the occasion. The commentators, dissatisfied with 
either of the old readings, have variously suggested 
leash, train, trash, cherish ; the last, and most unsuitable 
one, being Warburton's. It is in its ordinary sense, as 
where Iago speaks of 'this poor trash of Venice,' that 
the word is everywhere else used by Shakespeare, unless 
in the reference by Prospero to his brother's perfidious 
policy. When, in a later scene (Act iv. Sc. i.), Stephano 
and Trinculo yield to the temptation of the ' glistering 
apparel' purposely hung up by Ariel 'for stale to catch 
these thieves,' Caliban exclaims. ' Let it alone ; it is but 
trash.' But the passage in Prospero's speech appears to 
have been recognised as obscure or faulty by the first 
editors ; and it is accordingly changed conjecturally in 
the second folio. As printed in the 1623 folio, the text 
reads ' who t' advance, and who to trash,' which suggests 
to me a very possible misprint for — 

'Being once perfected how to grant suits, 
How to deny them ; who to advance, and who 
Too rash for overtopping.' 

That is to say, who were fit to be promoted, and who 
were too rash to be advanced over old servitors. Pros- 
pero accordingly goes on to say that he ' new created 
the creatures that were mine ; ' either ' changed them, 
or else new formed them.' In this way the original text 



NOTES ON 'THE TEMPEST: 



is adhered to more closely ; and yet, by the alteration of 
a single letter, a clear meaning is given to what was 
formerly obscure. 

'Pros. He being thus lorded, 

Not only with what my revenue yielded, 
But what my power might else exact, like one 
Who having into truth, by telling of it, 
Made such a sinner of his memory, 
To credit his own lie, he did believe 
He was indeed the duke.' 

This passage has occupied the commentators with 
very diverse efforts at its elucidation. Hanmer reads, 
loving an untruth, and telling V oft; Warburton, having 
unto truth, by telling oft ; Musgrave, having sinn'd to 
truth by telling 't oft ; the Collier folio, besides changing 
lorded into loaded, renders the later line, Who having 
to untruth, by telling of it; and its editor adds, 'There 
cannot be a doubt that this, as regards untruth at least, 
is the language of Shakespeare.' 

Query :— 

Who hating an untruth. 

Prospero says, ' My trust, like a good parent, did beget 
of him a falsehood.' It seems in the same vein of 
reasoning to say of him so trusted,' that he resembled 
one who, originally hating an untruth, ended by 
believing his own lie. 



' Me, poor man, my library 
Was dukedom large enough ; of temporal royalties 
He thinks me now incapable; confederates, 
So dry he was for sway, wi' the King of Naples 
To give him annual tribute,. do him homage, 
Subject his coronet to his crown.' 

It may be worth noting, that in the first folio it is 
temporall roalties ; in the second folio it becomes 
Q 



NOTES ON 'THE TEMPEST! 



roialties. But why 'temporal royalties'? There were 
no spiritual ones in question. The reference may be 
presumed to be to Prosperous supernatural rule, but to 
this he has made no allusion. He has only spoken of 
himself as ' rapt in secret studies,' and 

' Neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated 
To closeness and the bettering of my mind 
"With that which, but by being so retired, 
O'erprized all popular rate.' 

Probably royalties is the true word ; but the change of 
a single letter, in the first folio, would give realties, a 
word contrasting with the supernatural things to which, 
by any interpretation, temporal must have reference ; 
and to which, as afterwards appears, the ' secret studies ' 
refer. 

' Subject his coronet to his crown.' As in Shake- 
speare's day his was the neuter, as well as the masculine 
possessive form, this may be read as equivalent to — 
' Subject its coronet to his crown.' It was the coronet of 
Milan, but not yet of Antonio. There remains one other 
word, more clearly open to objection — ' So dry he was 
for sway.' In the folios it is drie. 

Query :— 

So ripe he was for sway. 



'Pros. Now the condition. 

This king of Naples, being an enemy 
To me inveterate, hearkens my brother's suit; 
Which was, that he, in lieu o' the premises, ■ 
Of homage and I know not how much tribute.' 

Knight explains this, in £\\e premises of homagg, &c. — the 
circumstances of homage premised! 

Query:— 

in view o' the promises 
Of homage. 



NOTES ON 'THE TEMPEST.' 



' Pros. Thou didst smile, 

Infused with a fortitude from heaven, 
When I have deck'd the sea with drops full salt, 
Under my burthen groan'd; which raised in me 
An undergoing stomach, to bear up 
Against what should ensue.' 

The commentators have manifested their recognition 
of some defect by proposing such changes as these : 
Hanmer reads for ' deck'd,' bracked ; Warburton, mocked ; 
] ohnson, fleck' d; and Reed, degg'd. 

Query : — 

Thou didst smile, 
Infused with a fortitude from heaven, 
When I have lack'd. The sea, with drops full salt, 
Under my burthen groan'd; which raised in me, &c. 



'Pros. This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child.' 

Sycorax is spoken of with every term of loathing : as 
a ' foul witch,' a ' hag,' a ' damned witch,' &c. There 
seems no propriety in coupling with these the term 
blue-eyed — one of the tokens, according to Rosalind, in 
' As You Like It,' whereby to know a man in love. In 
the first and second folios it is ' blew ey'd.' Query : — 
blear-eyed, or bleared. 



'Pros. Thy groans 

Did make wolves howl, and penetrate the breasts 
Of ever-angry bears.' 

Query : — of even angry bears. 



' Pros. Urchins 

Shall, for that vast of night that they may work 
All exercise on thee.' 

Query : — shall forth at vast of night. 

The term vast is sanctioned by its use in ' Hamlet,' 
where Horatio says, ' In the dead vast and middle of the 
Q 2 



NOTES ON < THE TEMPEST.' 



night ; ' so at least it stands in three of the quartos, 
though in two others it is rendered wast. This becomes 
in the folios waste, and by Malone is converted into 
waist. 

' Pros. One word more ; I charge thee 

That thou attend me : thou dost here usurp 
The name thou owest not.' 

Query :— 

One word more : I charge thee — 
Dost thou attend me? — thou dost here usurp, &c. 



'Mir. O, dear father, 

Make not too rash a trial of him, for 
He's gentle and not fearful. 

Pros. What! I say, 

My foot my tutor? ' 

In this passage the former owner of my 1632 folio 
has changed rash into harsh — an ingenious, but certainly 
false conjecture ; for Miranda, not less regardful of her 
father than her lover, says : — Do not too rashly put his 
forbearance to the test, for he is no churl, but of gentle 
blood and courage. Another correction by the same 
hand deals with a word already recognised as doubtful. 
Dryden changes /<?#/ into child; Walker suggests/^/; 
the same unknown annotator corrects it thus : — ' What, 
I say, foolish, — my tutor ! ' 



ACT II. Scene I. 

' Gon. How lush and lusty the grass looks ! how green ! ' 

The word lush is of doubtful origin and significance. 
Henley affirms it to mean 'rank'; Malone, 'juicy'; Knight 
quotes the word lushy as applied to a drunkard ; 
R. Grant White suggests it to be a corruption of 



NOTES OiV 'THE TEMPEST' 



luscious. Is it too simple a suggestion that the word 
was fresh ? The manuscript would readily admit of 
such a misreading. 

' Seb. Where she, at least, is banish'd from your eye, 
Who hath cause to wet the grief on't. 

Alon. Prithee, peace. 

Seb. You were kneel'd to and importun'd otherwise, 
By all of us ; and the fair soul herself 
W T eigh'd between loathness and obedience, at 
Which end o' the beam should bow.' 

Query : — 

to weigh the grief on't. 

Swayed between loathness and obedience, at 
Which end o' the beam she 'd bow. 

The folios have the word waigltd, which I had noted 
conjecturally on my own copy as a misprint for swayed. 
From the Cambridge Shakespeare it appears that S. 
Verges has already suggested this, though its editors 
overlook the suggestive orthography of the folio. The 
she'd, instead of shoidd, is Malone's, and adopted by 
Knight. By dropping the at of the previous line, the 
should would be more expressive. But, as has already 
been shewn, the at, so placed, is highly characteristic of 
the peculiar metre of this and one or two other of 
Shakespeare's latest plays. 



'Ant. I am more serious than my custom; you 
Must be so too, if heed me; which to do 
Trebles thee o'er.' 

What does Trebles thee der mean here ? Looking at it 
in its relation to the context, it has to be borne in re- 
membrance that Antonio, himself a traitorous usurper, is 
making the first suggestion of treason, in purposedly 
obscured hints, to Sebastian, the king of Naples' brother. 
The king lies asleep ; his son, the heir to the crown, is 



2 3 o NOTES ON 'THE TEMPEST' 

believed to be drowned ; and a few sentences further on 
the suggestion assumes this undisguised shape : — 

' Here lies your brother, 
No better than the earth he lies upon, 
If he were that which now he 's like, that 's dead ; 
Whom I, with this obedient steel, three inches of it, 
Can lay to bed for ever.' 

In the folios the text reads — Trebbles thee dre. Pope 
renders it Troubles thee o'er; Hanmer, Troubles thee not. 



Query 



I am more serious than my custom ; you 
Must be so too, if — heed me, — which to do 't 
Rebels thee o'er. 



The previous talk with Gonzalo, and the darker hints 
since, have been carried on with quip, pun, and inuendo. 
If we understand Sebastian's reply, ' Well, I am standing 
water,' as a play on the word rebels, i. e. ' ripples thee 
o'er' it is no worse pun than others which have preceded 
it ; and hence follows metaphorical talk of flowing, 
ebbing, and running near the bottom. 



'Ant. She that from Naples 

Can have no note, unless the sun were post, — 
The man i' the moon's too slow, — till new-born chins 
Be rough and razorable ; she that from whom 
We all were sea-swallow'd, though some cast again.' 
Query :— 

She from whom we 
All were sea-swallow'd, though some cast again. 

This is equivalent to ' She, coming from whom,' &c. 
Otherwise it might read, ' She for whom we.' The 
earlier line, ' She that from Naples,' may have misled 
the compositor in this subsequent line, as in similar 
cases. Mr. Spedding suggests to the Cambridge editors, 
' She that — From whom ? All were sea-swallow'd,' &c, 



NOTES ON 'THE TEMPEST: 



making the ' From whom ' an interjectional reference to 
the previous ' She can have no note from Naples till 
new-born babies have beards to shave ! ' Rowe, Pope, 
Singer, and other commentators, all concur in recog- 
nising some defect in the text 



'Ant. There be that can rule Naples 

As well as he that sleeps: lords that can prate 
As amply and as unnecessarily 
As this Gonzalo : I myself could make 
A chough of as deep chat. 
Query : — 

A chough give as deep chat. 



Scene II. 

' Cal. I'll bring thee 

To clustering filberts, and sometimes I'll get thee 
Young scamels from the rock.' 

Scamels is the word in the folios It has been con- 
jecturally amended, seamalls, sea-mews, staunels, and 
shamois ; the last being Theobald's. Hunter thinks 
the word scamels genuine, because 'as it stands it 
gives us a very melodious line,' and also from ' the 
difficulty of finding a word which the printer may 
be supposed to have mistaken.' Nevertheless he 
suggests samphire. Caliban has said just before, ' I 
with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts,' so that 
something simple may be assumed. 

Query muscles. It fulfils one of Mr. Hunter's 
requirements, being nearly a transposition of the 
letters, and is more likely than either shamois or 
samphire. The special luxury of ' young muscles from 
the rock ' may also fitly contrast with the previous 
threat of Prospero to Ferdinand : ' Thy food shall be 
the fresh-brook muscles.' 



NOTES ON 'THE TEMPEST? 



ACT III. Scene I. 

' Fer. My sweet mistress 

Weeps when she sees me work, and says such baseness 
Had never like executor. I forget : 
But these sweet thoughts do even refresh my labours 
Most busy lest, when I do it.' 

The reading of the last line has been the subject of a 
multitude of conjectures. The lest of the first folio 
becomes least in the second. Pope reads least busy, 
Theobald, most busie-less, and so on, through busiest, busy 
felt, busy still, busiliest, of a succession of commentators, 
crowned with Collier's folio marginal note of most busy- 
blest. 

Query : — 

Do even refresh my labour 
Most baseless when I do it. 

Baseless would thus stand in apposition to the baseness 
of his previous comment : ' Some kinds of baseness are 
nobly undergone,' &c. 



' Fer. Would no more endure 

This wooden slavery, than to suffer 
The flesh-fly blow my mouth.' 

In the first folio it is wodden, in the second it becomes 
woodden. 



Query:— 



This sudden slavery. 



Scene II. 

' Trin. Why thou debosh'd fish, thou.' 

The Cambridge editors, contrary to their usual adher- 
ence to the original text, undertake here to improve on 



iVOTES 0A r l TIIE TEMPEST: 



the drunken talk of Trinculo, by the change of dcbostid 
to debauched — a questionable improvement. 



Scene III. 

' Gon. By'r lakin, I can go no further, sir ; 
My old bones ache : here 's a maze trod, indeed, 
Through forth-rights and meanders ! ' 

The only other example of the use of forth-right occurs 
in ' Troilus and Cressida,' Act iii. Sc. 3, where Ulysses 
says to Achilles : — 

' If you give way, 
Or hedge aside from the direct forth right.' 

Here ' the direct forth right ' means undoubtedly the 
straight course, and so it is supposed to stand in the 
same sense, in Gonzalo's use of it, in apposition to 
' meanders.' But treading a maze through direct courses 
does not seem the most likely expression. In the first 
folio it is fourth rights. According to the Cambridge 
editors it becomes forth-rights in the second, third and 
fourth folios. So far, at least, as my copy of the second 
folio is concerned, it is forth rights without the hyphen. 
Bearing in view the previous experiences, to which 
Gonzalo refers, I venture to suggest 

Through sore frights and meanders. 



'Ariel. You three 

From Milan did supplant good Prospero; 
Exposed unto the sea, which hath requit it, 
Him and his innocent child.' 



Query :- 



234 NOTES ON 'THE TEMPEST.' 



ACT IV. Scene I. 

' Pros. Now come, my Ariel ! bring a corollary 
Rather than want a spirit ; appear and pertly ! ' 

What is a corollary here ? Knight explains it as 'a 
surplus number.' In the folio it is printed with a capital, 
as though it were the name of some spirit. But capitals 
are employed too freely by the early printers to make 
this of much moment. The word is used nowhere else 
by Shakespeare, is unmusical where it stands, and is 
probably a misprint. The concluding word of the next 
line, pertly, seems also inapt. Ariel has just before 
asked if the masque is expected presently. This I 
imagine to be the word repeated, abbreviated probably in 
the original manuscript, at the end of a long line. As 
to the other conjectural change suggested here: it will 
be remembered that Prospero's command to Ariel is 

' Go bring the rabble, 
O'er whom I give thee power, here to this place: 
Incite them to quick motion.' 

Query :— 

Now come, my Ariel ! bring a whole array 
Rather than want a spirit; appear, and presently.' 



' Ceres [Song]. Vines with clustering bunches growing; 
Plants with goodly burthen bowing; 
Spring come to you at the farthest 
In the very end of harvest.' 

Spring can scarcely be the word here. Collier's folio 
notes substitute rain. But an apt change is suggested 
if we consider the nature of the invitation to which Ceres 

is responding : Juno says : — 

' Go with me 
To bless this twain, that they may prosperous be, 
And honour'd in their issue.' 

Query :— 

Offspring come to you at farthest. 



/VOTES ON 'THE TEMPEST.' 



' Fer. Let me live here ever ; 

So rare a wonder'd father and a wife 
Makes this place paradise.' 

The Cambridge editors seem to imply that the word 
rendered wife here, is one of those in which different 
copies of the first folio vary, some giving it as wife, and 
some as wise ; and they accordingly adopt the former, 
with the punctuation as given above. Judging from the 
photozincographic facsimile of the first folio, to which 
alone I have access, it reads wise. But owing to the use 
of the long s, the difference between the two letters is 
exceedingly slight ; and where the printing is not per- 
fectly clear, it is just one of the rare cases where the 
facsimile might mislead. In the second folio it is un- 
questionably wise, and is punctuated accordingly, thus : — 

So rare a wonder'd father, and a wise, 
Makes this place paradise. 

This, I cannot doubt, is the true reading. Pope, who 
adopts wife, changes makes to make, to agree with 
the two nominatives. But it is common enough with 
Shakespeare to make the verb agree with the nearest 
nominative. Collier parades his folio annotator as 
giving what he assumes to be ' the final decision in favour 
of wife? Prospero has just replied' to a question of 
Ferdinand, that the majestic vision they have witnessed 
is the work of spirits, called forth by his art to enact his 
present fancies ; and he naturally responds : ' Let me 
ever live in a place which so wonderful and wise a father 
converts into a paradise.' 



'Ariel. At last I left them 

I' the filthy- mantled pool beyond your cell, 
There dancing up to the chins, that the foul lake 
O'erstunk their feet.' 

Feet cannot be the word here, when they were up to their 



236 NOTES ON 'THE TEMPEST! 

chins. Spedding suggests fear. Should it not be fell ? 
Macbeth speaks of the time when his ' fell of hair 
would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir, as life were in't;' 
and Corin, in ' As You Like It,' speaking to Touchstone 
of the ewes, says ' their fells you know are greasy/ 



' Cal. The dropsy drown this fool ! ' 

In the folio it is dropsie. Query deep sea. 



'Pros. Go, charge my goblins that they grind their joints 
With dry convulsions ; shorten up their sinews 
With aged cramps.' 

Query — 

wry convulsions . . . agned cramps. 



ACT V. Scene I. 

'Pros. My charms crack not; my spirits obey.' 

Query: — break not. He says shortly after, ' My charms 
I '11 break.' 

' Ariel. The king, 

His brother, and yours, abide all three distracted, 
And the remainder mourning over them, 
Brimful of sorrow and dismay.' 

So it is in the Cambridge and in other editions. But in 
the folios it is brim full, which makes better rhythm, 
and no worse meaning. 



'Pros. A solemn air, and the best comforter 
To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains, 
Now useless, boil'd within thy skull ! ' 

The folios have boile and boil. BoiVd is the suggestion 
of Pope. 



NOTES ON 'THE TEMPEST.' 



Query ' now useless coil,' as in Act i. Sc. 2, 

• My brave spirit 
Who was so firm, so constant, that this coil 
Would, not affect their reason.' 



' Pros. O good Gonzalo, 

My true preserver, and a loyal sir 
To him thou follow'st.' 

Collier's MS. substitutes servant for sir. Query suitor. 
It is not his loyalty or service to the usurper that Pros- 
pero commends ; but he may refer, in calling him a loyal 
suitor, to the fidelity with which he sued to Antonio, the 
usurping duke, on Prospero's behalf. 



' Pros. Their understanding 

Begins to swell ; and the approaching tide 
Will shortly fill the reasonable shore 
That now lies foul and muddy. Not one of them 
That yet looks on me, or would know me.' 

The first and second folios both read : ' That now ly 
foule.' Assuming that some change is necessary, I 
should prefer adhering to this, and reading : ' The rea- 
sonable shores that now lie foul.' The repetition of 
That at the beginning of two successive lines suggests 
the possibility of a compositor's misreading here, as in 
similar instances. Query, ' E'en yet looks on me.' 



' Alon. You the like loss! 

Pros. As great to me as late ; and supportable 
To make the dear loss, have I means much weaker 
Than you may call to comfort you.' 

Query reparable. Prospero is replying to Alonzo's 
exclamation ' Irreparable is the loss.' Supportable is 
unmusical and mars the rhythm. 



238 NOTES ON 'THE TEMPEST.' 

' Pros. Mark but the badges of these men, my lords, 

Then say if they be true 

These three have robb'd me ; and this demi-devil — 
For he's a bastard one — hath plotted with them 
To take my life.' 

My 1632 folio bears on its margin the substitution of 
visages for badges. But the badges which shewed they 
were not true, were, I presume, the stolen apparel in 
which Stephano and Trinculo are decked. But as 
Caliban would ' have none on't,' it should read ' these 
two have robb'd me.' 



' Alon. Where should they find this grand liquor that hath gilded 'em ? ' 

Shakespeare repeatedly uses the word gilded, but no- 
where else in this sense. Query guiled. 

The epilogue which is appended to 'The Tempest' 
seems an impotent afterpiece to this beautiful comedy. 
It embodies in lame verse a feeble re-echo of the pre- 
vious sentiments, without a single novel or apt idea. It 
resembles in no respect Shakespeare's own epilogues, 
and may be unhesitatingly assigned to some nameless 
playwright of the seventeenth century. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 

' Bottom. I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, — past 
the wit of man to say what dream it was : man is but an ass if he go 

about to expound this dream. Methought I was there is no man can 

tell what.' — A Midsummer Night's Dream. 

THE text of ' A Midsummer Night's Dream' rests on 
different authority from that of ' The Tempest,' 
which appeared for the first time in the 1623 folio, seven 
years after its author's death. A quarto edition of ' A 
Midsummer Night's Dream ' was printed for Thomas 
Fisher, and ' soulde at his shoppe, at the Signe of the 
White Hart, in Fleetestreete,' in the year 1600. It bears 
the name of William Shakespeare on the title ; was duly 
entered at Stationers' Hall ; and, though characterised 
by the usual carelessness of the press at that date, was, 
we may presume, set up from the author's manuscript. 
This was followed during the same year by another, and 
probably surreptitious reprint, by James Roberts, in which 
the printer's errors of the first quarto are corrected, and 
the stage directions somewhat augmented, but with a due 
crop of misreadings of its own. The Cambridge editors 
surmise that it was a pirated reprint of Fisher's quarto, 
for the use of the players. As such it got into the hands 
of those two special players who issued the first folio as 
'Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and 
Tragedies. Published according to the True Originall 
Copies ; ' and who, in the preface, pray their readers that 
they ' doe not envy his friends the office of their care 



A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 



and paine to have collected and published them.' They 
accordingly gave proof of their painstaking, so far as 
this comedy is concerned, by following the surreptitious 
copy. The first quarto thus appears to be the better au- 
thority for the text of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream ;' 
and the folios have little more value than what is due 
to contemporary conjectural emendation. This is fully 
illustrated in the variations of the quarto and folio texts 
in a passage immediately to be noticed, from the first 
scene. 

It is perhaps due to the early place which ' A Mid- 
summer Night's Dream' undoubtedly occupies among 
the dramatic works of Shakespeare, that in all the older 
texts it is divided into acts, but not into scenes. The 
stage directions also are meagre, and have been re- 
peatedly confused with the text ; and no list of dramatis 
persona is given. Hence those points have remained to 
be supplied at the discretion of successive editors ; and 
considerable diversity prevails. The same scene, for 
example, which Capell and other editors make the 
second scene in Act ii. becomes the third of Steevens 
and Knight, and the fifth of Pope. 

In many ways it is apparent that this play is the work 
of a different period from that in which its author wrote 
'The Tempest ;' and it has even been supposed to embody 
recollections of the author's own boyish years. Young 
Shakespeare was in his twelfth year when the Earl of 
Dudley entertained Queen Elizabeth with the famous 
allegorical pageants produced at Kenilworth in honour 
of her visit. The preparations for this magnificent recep- 
tion of royalty enlisted the services of the inhabitants of 
the surrounding country; and it is not to be doubted that 
those of Stratford, only a few miles distant, bore their 
full share alike in the labours and the pastimes of this 



A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 



grand local event. Among the characteristic allegorical 
devices introduced on the occasion, Triton, in likeness of 
a mermaid, paid obeisance to her Majesty; and Arion, 
seated on a dolphin's back, enchanted her with a song, 
' aptly credited to the matter.' It is a pleasant fancy to 
believe that the gifted boy actually witnessed this ; and 
recalling the delights of his youthful fancy at the en- 
chanting scene, he reproduced it in the well-known piece 
of delicate flattery introduced into his ' Dream,' as a 
more lasting tribute to the Maiden Queen : — 

' Oberon. My gentle Puck, come hither. Thou rememb'rest 
Since once I sat upon a promontory, 
And heard a mermaid, on a dolphin's back, 
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath, 
That the rude sea grew civil at her song ; 
And certain stars shpt madly from their spheres, 
To hear the sea-maid's music. 

Pitch. I remember. 

Oberon. That very time I saw, but thou couldst not, 
Flying between the cold moon and the earth, 
Cupid all arm'd ; a certain aim he took 
At a fair vestal throned by the west ; 
And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow, 
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts : 
But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft 
Quench'd in the chaste beams of the watery moon ; 
And the imperial votaress passed on, 
In maiden meditation, fancy-free.' 

Malone, judging from internal evidence, regards this 
delicately fanciful drama as revealing all ' the warmth 
of a youthful and lively imagination ;' and therefore he 
concludes it to be one of his earliest attempts at comedy. 
But there is nothing crude or immature in it. On the 
contrary, much of its poetry is of the rarest beauty : yet 
dallying with the innocence of love, and fancifully inter- 
blending its mishaps with ' such sights as youthful poets 
dream.' Its light and airy, yet exquisitely charming 
verse, has received the highest meed of appreciation ; for 
R 



242 A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS DREAM. 

it has passed beyond the region of dramatic dialogue 
into that current popular poetry which is familiar as 
household words ; and is scarcely assigned to individual 
authorship, but rather constitutes a part of the living 
language, an universal property wherever the English 
tongue is spoken. The wonderful exuberance of fancy 
which characterises this comedy has already attracted 
our notice ; but many portions of _ the_dialogue are in 
rhyme, and much both of the prose and verse is pur- 
posely wrought into a gay medley, which scarcely admits 
of the same strict critical analysis as ' The Tempest.' 
Indeed not a little of the charm of the prose dialogue 
lies in the unconscious blunderings of the Athenian 
mechanics. It has been subjected, nevertheless, to the 
same critical revision as others of the plays. Rowe, 
Pope, Theobald, Hanmer, Warburton, Johnson, and later 
commentators, down to Collier, with his antique MS. 
notes, have all tried their hands at the work of restoration. 
Some of their emendations are welcome elucidations of 
obscure or blundered passages. Others, especially those 
on the lighter dialogue of the 'hempen homespuns 
swaggering here,' are of a piece with the sage comments 
of the censorious Bottom himself on ' the tedious brief 
scene of young Pyramus and his love Thisbe : very 
tragical mirth.' Little more is attempted here than the 
production of a few notes and comments on obscure 
passages, the fruits of careful and reverent study of 
the play. 

ACT I. Scene I. 

"■Bern. Relent, sweet Hermia; and, Lysander, yield 
Thy crazed title to my certain right.' 

Query razed title. The decision of Theseus has just 



A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 



been given, by which all claim or title of Lysander to 
Hermia's hand is erased. The word razed repeatedly 
occurs in this sense in the dramas. 



' Lys. And she, sweet lady, dotes, 

Devoutly* dotes, dotes in idolatry, 
Upon this spotted and inconstant man.' 

Spotted is a Shakespearean word, the opposite of spot- 
less : as Richard II. speaks of the spotted souls of his 
disloyal nobles. No one therefore would venture to 
disturb the text. But I may note here the conjectural 
change pencilled by me on the margin as harmonising, 
by antithesis, with Helena's 'devout idolatry' to her for- 
sworn lover. 

'Pon ibis apostate and inconstant man. 



The following example of variations in the quarto and 
folio texts will illustrate how little authority can be 
attached to the latter as fulfilling the promise of the 
editors that where the readers of Shakespeare had before 
been ' abus'd with divers stolne and surreptitious copies, 
maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of 
injurious impostors, even those are now offer'd to their 
view cured and perfect of their limbes.' The passage is 
here given according to the text of the 1632 folio, in 
which some attempts are made to remove the careless 
blunders of the first folio : — 

' Lysander. How now my love ? Why is your cheek so pale ? 

How chance the Roses there do fade so fast? 
Hermia. Belike for want of raine, which I could well 

Beteeme them, from the tempest of mine eyes. 
Lysander. Hermia for ought that ever I could reade, 

Could ever heare by tale or history, 

The course of true love never did run smooth, 

But either it was different in blood. 
Hermia. O crosse! too high to be enthral'd to love. 
R 2 



A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 



Lysander. Or else misgraffed, in respect of yeares. 

Hermia. O spight ! too old to be ingag'd to yong. 

Lysander. Or else it stood upon the choise of merit. 

Hermia. O hell! to choose love by anothers eye.' 

The only other example of the use of the word beteem 
by Shakespeare, is where Hamlet, speaking of his 
father's loving care for his mother, says : ' He might not 
beteem the winds of heaven visit her face too roughly.' 
It can scarcely admit of any common meaning applicable 
in the two cases. But it is used by Spenser as equivalent 
to bestow, in which sense it suits the text, and as it has 
the authority both of the quartos and folios, must stand. 
I had noted bestrewn as a conjectural reading. Bestow 
would accord with another passage, where Henry V. in 
his prayer before the battle of Agincourt, says of the 
dead Richard's body — 

' And on it have bestowed more contrite tears 
Than from it issued forced drops of blood.' 

The quartos have ' Eigh me, for ought that I could 
ever read.' The first folio, omitting the ' Eigh me,' 
simply has : ' For ought that euer I could reade,' and 
the second folio replaces the ejaculation of the quartos 
with the name, nearly equivalent in sound, of Hermia. 

The change of love (in the first folio lone) into low — 

' O cross ! too high to be enthrall'd to low ' — 

is due to Theobald, and commends itself to nearly every 
reader as a restoration of Shakespeare's own word. 

' Or else it stood upon the choice of friends ' 

is the text of the quartos ; 3^et it is changed, undoubtedly 
for the worse, to merit, as shewn in the above version of 
the folio text. This example of variation between the 
quartos and folios serves to shew how little authority can 
be attached to the latter ; and at the same time illustrates 



A MIDSUMMER XIGHT'S DREAM. 245 

the impossibility in some cases of amending undoubted 
errors by conjectural changes based on any probable 
misprint. Hermia's response perfectly accords with the 
original reading of the quartos, while it has little or no 
meaning in reply to ' the choice of merit,' which is never- 
theless retained in the first and subsequent folios. Here 
there can scarcely be a doubt that the latter is an un- 
designed change for the worse. But nothing in the con- 
text helps to any conjecture as to the origin of the 
blunder, while its retention in the second and later folios 
indicates that the original quarto text was, so far at 
least, neglected in the corrections of the press. Collier's 
MS. annotator makes the feeble emendation of men for 
merit. It is a good illustration of the guesswork restora- 
tions based on supposed typographical errors ; and is an 
instance where, if the word friends had not the authority 
of the quartos to sustain it, the feebler word might have 
found favour, owing to its seeming resemblance to the 
objectionable merit. Mr. Collier, who does not seem to 
have been aware of the earlier authority for the received 
reading, says 'friends has ordinarily been substituted 
for merit; but men, inserted in the margin by the 
corrector of the folio, is likely to have been the real 
word, misheard by the copyist.' 



' Hel. Sicknesse is catching: O were favour so, 
Your words Ide catch, faire Hermia ere I go. 
My eare should catch your voice, my eye, your eye, 
My tongue should catch your tongues sweet melodic' 

So the text stands in the second folio ; and as it 
makes good sense, it might be allowed to remain. But 
alike in the quartos and first folio it reads, ' Your words 
I catch,' and Hanmer made on this the apt emendation, 
' Yours would I catch,' which more fully accords with 
the whole context. 



246 A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 



ACT II. Scene I. 

'Fairy. And I serve the fairy queen, 
To dew her orbs upon the green.' 

Knight, as his fashion is, explains the word orbs here 
by devising a meaning suited ToThe context, and fitting 
it to the word. He accordingly says : ' Orbs, the fairy 
rings, as they are popularly called. It was the fairy's 
office to dew these orbs, which had been parched under 
the fairy feet in the moonlight revels.' The word J s re- 
peatedly used by Shakespeare, but neverlrPany such 
sense ; and what follows" IfTthe fairy's speech implies 
that it is the flowers that, in some way, he speaks of. 
The cowslips are her special favourites, 'her pensioners' ; 
and so he says — 

'I must go seek some dewdrops here, 
And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear.' 

This is fitter work than dewing orbs, or parched fairy- 
rings. Grey suggests herbs. 

Query— 

To dew her cups upon the green. 



'Puck. And now they never meet in grove or green, 
By fountain clear, or spangled starlight sheen, 
But they do square, that all their elves, for fear, 
Creep into acorn-cups and hide them there.' 

Unless doubtfully in a passage in ' Titus Andronicus,' 
the word square is not used in such a sense as would 
suit the text, especially in reference to the fairy king 
and queen. P eck sug gests jar, or sparre. 
Query quarrel. 

' Tit. And never since the middle summer's spring, 
Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead.' 



A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM 



Knight explains ( thgjniddle summer's spring ' as the 
beginning of midsummer ; but it seems a cumbrous 
tautology in this sense. Looking to the context, which 
describes, as the fruit of Oberon and Titania's brawls, 
contagious fogs, the green corn rotting in the drowned 
field, and 'the nine men's morris' filled up with mud, 
I had noted as a conjectural reading ' this muddy sum- 
mer's spring.' But_.£L_- slighter change would be ' the 
middle summer's prime' 



' Tit. The human mortals want their winter here ; 
No night is now with hymn or carol blest.' 

Various conjectures have been offered in amendment 
of the somewhat pointless ' winter here! Johnson changes 
it to wonted year ; Warburton to winter 'j Jicrycd. Theo- 
bald had already proposed the better amendment of 
winter chear, or cheer, which suits very well the context ; 
and closely accords with the old spelling of the folios, 
heere. Looking to the previous statements, that ' The 
ox hath stretch'd his yoke in vain,' 'The ploughman 
lost his sweat,' ' The green corn hath rotted,' and ' The 
folds stand empty in the drowned field,' I am led to 
suggest their winter hire. 



' Dem. Hence, get thee gone, and follow me no more. 
Hel. You draw me, you hard-hearted adamant; 
But yet you draw not iron, for my heart 
Is true as steel; leave you your power to draw, 
And I shall have no power to follow you.' 

This passage has not hitherto been challenged ; but 
the meaning of ' you draw not iron, for my heart is true 
as steel ' is obscure. If it were rendered. ' But yet you 
draw not iron, though my heart is true as steel,' the 
idea might be that she had no heart of iron, hard as 



248 A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 

his was. But I suspect the iron to be a printer's blunder, 
suggested by the steel following. In the folios Iron is 
printed with a capital, which, in the second folio is some- 
what displaced, and separated from the ron. This has 
apparently suggested to the former possessor of my copy 
an ingenious emendation, which he has written on the 
margin thus : You draiv, not I run, for, &c. Among my 
own annotations are included this conjectural reading : — 
' But yet you draw no truer ; for my heart 
Is true as steel.' 

Scene II. 

' Tit. Come, now a roundel and a fairy song ; 
Then, for the third part of a minute, hence: 
Some to kill cankers in the musk-rose buds : 
Some war with rere-mice for their leathern wings, 
To make my small elves coats; and some keep back 
The clamorous owl, that nightly hoots and wonders 
At our quaint spirits. Sing me now asleep ; 
Then to your offices, and let me rest.' 

The idea of the third part of a minute dedicated to 
the fulfilment of the fairy queen's behests, by the com- 
panions of Puck, who could ' put a girdle round the earth 
in forty minutes,' admirably accords with the movements 
of such airy beings, swift as thought. But Warburton so 
utterly misses the meaning, that he converts such fairy 
pastimes into a toil for the third part of the midnight. 



'Her. Lie further off: in human modesty, 
Such separation as may well be said 
Becomes a virtuous bachelor and a maid.' 

Titania's use of the phrase 'human mortals' is very 
expressive, but 'human modesty' seems a needless 
pleonasm. The word stands humane in the quartos, and 
in three out of the four folios. Nicholas Rowe, the 
earliest reviser of Shakespeare's text, made the fourth 



A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 



249 



folio the basis * of all his restorations, and no doubt 
adopted this without being aware of any variation. The 
elder form of humane would be preferable, though it can 
scarcely be claimed as a purposed change, for this is 
the usual mode of spelling human in Shakespeare's day. 
If any change is to be made, common modesty would 
better suit the context. 



ACT I'll. Scene II. 

1 Obe. This falls out better than I could devise ; 
But hast thou yet latch't the Athenian's eyes 
With the love-juice, as I did bid thee do ? ' 

The word is variously latcht, lacht, in the quartos and 
folios. Hanmer makes it lech'd, another commentator 
laced; while Knight, seeking as usual a meaning in the 
context, explains it licked o'er. But is there any such 
word ? Puck is elsewhere commanded to ' anoint his 
eyes ;' or he is to ' crush this herb into Lysander's eye.' 
Oberon speaks of the juice as 'on sleeping eye-lids laid,' 
and himself undertakes to ' streak ' Titania's eyes with the 
same potent fluid. But no such word as latch't is used 
elsewhere in any similar sense. Oberon's term, streaked, 
would here also suit the rhythm. But latch't may pos- 
sibly be a misprint for battid. 



'Her. I'll believe as soon 

This whole earth may be bor'd; and that the moon 
May through the centre creep, and so displease 
Her brother's noontide with the Antipodes.' 

Hanmer suggests disease in lieu of displease. The idea 
in relation to which Hermia introduces this quaint 
analogy is the substitution of Demetrius for her favoured 
lover Lysander, of whom she says, ' The sun was not so 



A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS DREAM. 



true unto the day as he to me;' and therefore she will as 
soon believe that at this very time of night, while the 
moon is here, the sun may be supplanted by it, on the 
other side of the world. 

Query : — 

' That the moon 
May through the centre creep, and so displace 
Her brother's noontide with the Antipodes.' 



' Hel. Can you not hate me, as I know you do, 
But you must join in souls to mock me too?' 

' Join in souls ' has been recognised as, in some way or 
other, wrong. Hanmer substitutes flouts for souls, and 
probably some such word is the true reading. Warbur- 
ton renders it must join insolents ; T 'y rwhitt, must join 
ill souls ; and Mason, with the slightest change on the 
text, You must join in soul. 

Query -.—join in sports. She accuses them of being all 
set against her for their merriment ; { all to make you 
sport;' and when Hermia enters, she charges her as 
one of this confederacy, joined ' all three to fashion this 
false sport.' 

'Her. Dark night, that from the eye his function takes, 
The ear more quick of apprehension makes ; 
Wherein it doth impair the seeing sense, 
It pays the hearing double recompense.' 

The his in the first line is undoubtedly the old Anglo- 
Saxon neuter genitive, and is as Shakespeare wrote it. 
Where, however, in this and many other lines, there is 
obviously no rhetorical gender, and the nominative it 
follows close at hand, it would be no greater liberty 
with the text to substitute the modern form its, than 
many orthographical changes universally approved of. 
Another passage in this comedy v/ill serve to illustrate 



A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 



the old use of his. Titania is detailing to Oberon the 
fruits of their brawls : — 

1 The ox hath therefore stretch'd bis yoke in vain. 
The ploughman lost bis sweat; and the green corn 
Hath rotted, ere bis youth attained a beard.' 

The new form was adopted in a single generation. 
Milton evades the obscurity in rhetorical impersona- 
tion consequent on his being in use as a neuter form, by 
falling back, whenever he can do so, on the gender of 
the Latin derivative ; e.g. ' Paradise Lost,' Bk. I, Lat. 

forma : — 

' His form had not yet lost 
All her original brightness.' 

But by the time that Dryden succeeded him as the 
poet of a new era — though he was in his forty-fourth 
year at Milton's death, — the change had been so univer- 
sally adopted, that in challenging the grammatical 
English of Ben Jonson he quotes this line from his 
' Catiline ' 

' Though heaven should speak with all his wrath at once,' 

and says of it ' Heaven is ill syntax with his.' 

This proof of how thoroughly a grammatical usage 
of Shakespeare's age had passed out of knowledge in a 
single generation, shews that Dryden's emendations on 
the text of ' The Tempest ' rest on little better authority 
than the guesses of modern commentators. He would 
have converted the his into its, not as a change rendered 
desirable by altered grammatical forms, but as the 
correction of a positive blunder. But many passages 
occur where the retention of the old neuter form is apt 
to mislead ; and as Shakespeare does occasionally em- 
ploy the new form, its substitution in other cases is 
allowable. Take, for example, the following lines from 
Oberon's directions to Puck : — 



2 5 2 A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 

' Then crush this herb into Lysander's eye ; 
"Whose liquor hath this virtuous property, 
To take from thence all error with his might, 
And make his eyeballs roll with wonted sight.' 

' With its might ' would be a legitimate emendation. 
The first his undoubtedly refers to the liquor, the second 
to Lysander ; yet as the text stands, it suggests the 
idea that, along with Lysander's ' error,' the liquor was to 
take away his might. 



' Hel. We, Hermia, like two artificial gods, 
Have with our needles created both one flower, 
Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion.' 

Pope needlessly takes in hand to amend the harmony 
of the second line, which is thoroughly Shakespearean. 
He reads ' Created with our needles both one flower.' 
Steevens, with the same object in view, abbreviates needles 
to neelds. But no commentator notices the extravagant 
simile, 'like two artificial gods.' I had noted on my 
own annotated copy the conjecture, like to artificer gods. 
But gods seems altogether alien to the general current 
of Helena's thoughts. Query, two artificial buds. 



' Hel. So we grew together, 

Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, 
But yet a union in partition ; 
Two lovely berries moulded on one stem ; 
So with two seeming bodies, but one heart; 
Two of the first, like coats in heraldry, 
Due but to one, and crowned with one crest.' 

To any one acquainted with heraldry, the phrase ' two 
of the first' seems such unmistakeable heraldic language, 
that he is apt to fancy he understands the whole allu- 
sion. But reduced to a defined solution, it does not 
appear by any means so clear. Monk Mason says ' two 
of the first means two coats of the first house, which are 



A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 253 

properly due but to one;' and Knight says, 'there is 
a double comparison here — first, of the two bodies com- 
pared to two coats of heraldry ; and secondly, of the 
one heart compared to the one crest, and the one 
owner.' But this can only end in the impaling of two 
similar coats of arms, and leaves the ' due but to one,' 
on which the whole force of the simile rests, unaccounted 
for. Douce and Grant White reject the heraldic signifi- 
cance of ' first,' and hold it to be used in its ordinary 
sense, referring to two bodies. Of the general meaning 
there can be no doubt. Helena tells Hermia that, with 
their ' sisters' vows ' and closest friendship, they had been 
as if with two bodies, yet but one heart. As, however, 
the heraldic interpretations seem to fail according to the 
received version, it may be worth while reconsidering 
the original text. The first folio reads, ' Two of the 
first life coats in heraldry.' The only change in the 
second folio is the insertion of a comma after life. 
Theobald changed the life to like. It seems to me that 
the text as it stands in the second folio, makes at least 
as good sense as the other, and no worse heraldry. Two 
bodies of the first life, would be moulded on one parental 
stem, and two coats in heraldry of the first life, would 
be due to one and the same descendant. 

' So with two seeming bodies, but one heart, 
Two of the first life : coats in heraldry- 
Due but to one, and crowned with one crest.' 



'Her. I understand not what you mean by this. 
Hel. Ay, do, persever, counterfeit sad looks, 
Make mouths upon me when I turn my back.' 

The first quarto, according to the Cambridge editors, 
reads, / doe. Persever. The second quarto and the 
folios are stated, on the same authority, to read /, do, 



254 A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 

persever. The first folio, in so far as the photozinco- 
graphic facsimile may be appealed to, reads — 

' I, doe, perseuer, counterfeit sad lookes, 
Make mouthes vpon me when I turne my backe.' 

In the second folio it becomes, I, do, persever, &c. The 
capital /, however, is the usual way of rendering the ay 
of our later orthography, and is not, therefore, any sure 
guide to the true reading. Rowe rendered it, Ay, do, 
persevere ; but modern critical editors have restored the 
persever, as essential to the rhythm. It seems to me 
more effective, as Helena's answer to Hermia, and not 
without some justification from the original text, to 
read — 

' I do ; — perceive you counterfeit sad looks.' 

She has already exclaimed shortly before, ' Now I per- 
ceive they have conjoin'd, all three ;' and when he says, 
' I understand not what you mean,' she replies, ' But I 
do ; I perceive you counterfeit sad looks, make mouths 
upon- me,' &c. 

' Her. Lysander, whereto tends all this ? 

Lys. Away, you Ethiope ! 

Bern. No, no ; he'll 

Seem to break loose ; take on as you would follow, 
But yet come not : you are a tame man, go ! ' 

This passage has given the commentators no little 
trouble. In the first quarto it is No, no.; heele Seeme to 
breake loose. The second, finding something wrong, 
renders it as one line — No, no, heel seeme to breake loose. 
The folio editors, or press reader, try another change, 
and it there reads, still as one line — No, no, Sir, seeme to 
breake loose. Pope rearranges the verse, and reads, No, 
no he'll seem To break away ; Capell makes it, No, no ; 
hell not come. Seem to break loose ; Malone, No, no ; 



A MIDSUMMER NIGHT S DREAM. 



he'll — sir, Seem to break loose; Steevens, No, no; sir: — he 
will, Seem to break loose ; while Jackson furnishes an 
amusing example of the misspent ingenuity which so 
often makes the error of one editor or commentator the 
basis of another's conjectures. Taking the sir of the 
folios as his guide, he renders it, No, no, he '// not stir ; 
Seem to break loose. The Cambridge editors, distracted 
with the multitude of counsellors, after exhausting a 
long foot-note, take up the question anew in the appen- 
dix, where they say, ' In this obscure passage we have 
thought it best to retain substantially the reading of the 
quartos. The folios, though they alter it, do not re- 
move the difficulty, and we must conclude that some 
words, perhaps a whole line, have fallen out of the text.' 
They accordingly indicate the supposed hiatus thus : — 

No, no; he'll . . . 
Seem to break loose ; &c. 

It seems presumptuous to follow such varied and high 
authorities with a new suggestion ; and still more, to 
fancy, as I am tempted to do, that a very trifling altera- 
tion clears up the whole difficulty, without any missing 
line. A pair of distracted lovers, set at cross purposes 
by Puck's knavish blundering, are giving vent to the 
most extravagant violence of language. Helena says, a 
very little before — 

' O spite ! O hell ! I see you all are bent 
To set against me for your merriment.' 

In like fashion, as it appears to me, Demetrius now 
exclaims, in language perfectly consistent with the rude 
epithets Lysander is heaping on Hermia — 

' No, no ; hell 
Seems to break loose; take on as you would, fellow ! 
But yet come not; you are a tame man, go!' 



256 A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 

Lysander's reply, though addressed seemingly to Hermia, 
is amply consistent with such violent hyperbole : — 

' Hang off, thou cat, thou burr ! vile thing, let loose, 
Or I will shake thee from me like a serpent.' 



ACT IV. Scene I. 

' Obe. And gentle Puck take this transformed scalp 
From off the head of this Athenian swain; 
That he awaking when the others do, 
May all to Athens back again repair.' 

All may to Athens is suggested by the context, but it is 
more musical as it stands. Query transforming scalp. 



It cannot but seem presumptuous to venture on any 
emendation of Nick Bottom's exquisite soliloquy, which 
he places far beyond reach of all carping critics by his 
solemn decision that ' man is but an ass if he go about 
to expound this dream.' Yet one little particle does 
seem to admit of change. His resolution is, ' I will get 
Peter Quince to write a ballad,' or, as the folios have it, 
a ballet, 'of this dream. It shall be called Bottom's 
Dream, because it hath no bottom, and I will sing it in 
the latter end of a play, before the duke. Peradventure, to 
make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.' 
At her death is doubtless at the death of Thisbe, when 
he, being already the dead Pyramus, would all the more 
characteristically turn up again with his own ballad, 
instead of the Bergomask dance which he does actually 
volunteer. Whether it be safe to venture on the change 
of a single letter in his inimitable confusions of all the 
senses may well be questioned ; but doubtless he means 
' in the latter end of the play ' of Pyramus and Thisbe, 



A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 



with a view to add one more climax to its ' very tragical 
mirth' : and not at the close of some possible future 
appearance before the duke. 



ACT V. Scene I. 

The comedy closes with a fairy dance and song, 
which the Cambridge editors, following the quartos, 
assign to Oberon. But this is obviously an error, 
though parts of it may be properly enough assigned 
to him to sing in solo. Johnson preceded them in re- 
storing the song to Oberon. But having by this means 
converted it into a part of the dialogue, he proceeds 
naively to enquire after the song which Titania calls 
for, and comes to the conclusion that ' it is gone after 
many other things of greater value. The truth is that 
two songs are lost,' one called for by Oberon and the 
other by Titania, because, as Johnson supposes, ' they 
were not inserted in the players' parts, from which the 
drama was printed.' All this is a mistake, founded 
on the revival of the original error of assigning the song 
to Oberon. On the contrary, his orders are given to 
' every elf and fairy sprite ' to perform various favouring 
services within the hallowed house of Duke Theseus and 
his bride, and then he a,dds : — 

' And this ditty after me 
Sing and dance it trippingly.' 

Titania thereupon joins in with her commands to their 
fairy train ; — 

' First rehearse your song by rote, 
To each word a warbling note ; 
Hand in hand with fairy grace, 
Will we sing and bless this place.' 

In the folios the song immediately follows this, printed 
S 



258 A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 

as such in italics, and headed The Song. It was no 
doubt at the date of the first folio, if not at that of 
the quartos, set to music, with its various parts appor- 
tioned to different fairy singers. Oberon and Titania 
doubtless had a prominent share assigned to them ; 
and the fairy chorus taking up alternate lines, repeating, 
and singing in parts, the verse would be arranged, in 
accordance with the exigencies of the music, and in all 
probability transcribed therefrom with no very critical 
attention to the order of the lines. In the folios the 
closing lines stand thus : — 

' With this field dew consecrate, 
Every fairy take his gate, 
And each severall chamber blesse, 
Through this pallace with sweet peace, 
Ever shall in safety rest, 
And the owner of it blest. 
Trip away, make no stay; 
Meet me all by breake of day.' 

It has been seen from the first that some change is 
needed here. Mr. R. Grant White says : ' " Ever shall 
in safety rest" is neither sense nor English, ancient or 
modern.' Rowe renders the line Ever shall it safely 
rest ; Malone, E*er shall it in safety rest ; Warburton, 
Ever shall it safely rest. Staunton appears to have 
first detected the true source of error, and suggested 
the transposition of the fifth and sixth lines, after at- 
tempting amendment in another way, by changing 
Ever shall into Every hall. Without being aware of 
his proposed transposition, I had already noted on 
the margin : ' These lines to be sung by different 
fairies'; and assuming them thus to be taken up by 
different singers, whereby the logical sequence might 
be disarranged, I had marked a more comprehensive 
re-arrangement. At the point where these lines begin 



A MIDSUMMER X/GIIT'S DREAM 



there is a change of theme. Oberon and Titania may- 
be assumed to take the lead, up to this point, with their 
special blessings on the bridal bed and the promised 
issue. The earlier portion correctly arranges itself in 
couplets, and may be supposed to be sung as a duet by 
Oberon and Titania. The scene lies in the palace of 
Theseus. ' The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve ;' 
and the irrepressible Bottom, whose death-stab 

'In that left pap, 
Where heart doth hop,' 

was supposed to have made an end of him in a previous 
scene, has in vain come alive again with his proffered 
epilogue. ' No epilogue, I pray you,' exclaims the Duke, 
' for your play needs no excuse. Never excuse ; for 
when the players are all dead, there need none be 
blamed :' and so his commands are — 

' Lovers to bed ; 'tis almost fairy-time, 
I fear we shall outsleep the coming morn.' 

Puck accordingly appears forthwith, broom in hand, to 
prepare 'the hallow'd house' for its supernatural visitants: 

' The fairies that do run, 

By the triple Hecate's team, 
From the presence of the sun, 
Following darkness like a dream.' 

Oberon despatches ' every elf and fairy sprite' to illumine 

the palace with their glimmering light. Titania invites 

them first to a rehearsal of their song of blessing ; and 

then, the whole fairy band being commissioned to wander 

through the house and fulfil their errand there till break 

of day, Oberon says : 

' To the best bride-bed will we, 
Which by us shall blessed be;' 

and so he proceeds with a succession of fairy bene- 
dictions in rhyming couplets. But how, at the close, 

S 2 



a6o A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM 

the fairy train are anew commissioned to go through 
the palace of Theseus and bless every chamber, conse- 
crating it with their elfin field-dew. Arranged in the 
following order, the consecutive relation of ideas seems 
to be more clearly expressed : — 

'Through this palace with sweet peace 
Every fairy take his gait, 
And each several chamber bless, 
With this field-dew consecrate; 
And the owners of it blest, 
Ever shall in safety rest ; 
Trip away ; 
Make no stay; 
Meet me all by break of day.' 

Oberon begins his part of this elfin consecration- 
service thus : — 

'Through the house give glimmering light 
By the dead and drowsy fire, 
Every elf and fairy sprite, 

Hop as light as bird from brier.' 

We have accordingly spoken above of Oberon despatch- 
ing his train to illumine the palace thus. But the first 
couplet seems to involve a confusion of ideas, which 
early attracted the attention of the commentators. 
Warburton makes the first line, Through this house; 
Johnson further changes it to, Through this house in 
glimmering light ; while Mr. R. Grant White offers the 
slight but apt change of Tho?/gh, for Through. My own 
conjectural reading suggests a different change, also in- 
volving no great literal variation : — Through the house- 
wives' glimmering light. The couplet of Puck which 
immediately precedes, sufficiently harmonises with such 
an idea, where with broom he sweeps the dust behind 
the door. 

It seems a piece of hypercriticism to subject the light 



A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 



fairy songs and the epilogue of Puck, with its rhyming 
couplets, to any severe verbal analysis. Where, however, 
the language seems obscure, the efforts at amending the 
text are sometimes rewarded by catching its meaning, 
without the necessity for any change. The notoriously 
careless way in which this comedy appears to have 
been edited from the first justifies suspicion of blundering 
whenever a difficulty occurs ; for none of all the plays of 
Shakespeare surpass 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' in 
the simple beauty of its charming verse. What, then, is 
the meaning of this line — 'No more yielding but a dream'} 
Like other readings where the text has been corrupted, 
it has a seeming significance in relation to the context 
till the meaning is challenged. Not a little of the beau- 
tiful fancy of the whole comedy turns on the way in which 
the supernatural elements seem to hover indefinitely 
between reality and a dream ; and so Puck says at parting, 
with this slight conjectural emendation : — 

' If we shadows have offended, 
Think but this, and all is mended, 
That you have but slumber'd here, 
While these visions did appear; 
And this weak and idle theme, 
No mere idling, but a dream, 
Gentles do not reprehend.' 

So much for conjectural revision and emendation of 
' A Midsummer Night's Dream.' In this, as in all other 
of the great master's works, the beauties are so manifold 
and so striking, that the few undoubted blemishes with 
which the textual critic is free to deal, are but as motes 
in the sunshine ; and Shakespeare can be enjoyed, with 
little sense of imperfection, in the most corrupt text of 
old quarto or folio. 

The marvellous piece of fancy thus subjected to cold 
critical supervision, is so wonderful an embodiment of 



A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 



sportive idealism ; such a happy blending of the utmost 
extremes of incongruity : that it seems as much to set 
analytical acumen at defiance as if it were an actual 
dream. That Lysander and Demetrius, Hermia and 
Helena, should so disport themselves, so woo, so rail, 
scorn and anathematise each other, prove faithless, 
proclaim loathing, and yet, after all, share in the fairy 
blessings whereby 

' Shall all the couples three 
Ever true in loving be,' 

would seem inconceivable, had not Shakespeare wrought 
the whole into such perfect consistency, that the imagina- 
tion welcomes it as the realisation of its own rarest 
fancy-flights, and claims for it a charmed circle within 
which imagination shall hold its own, and reason dispense 
with all censorious anatomisings. We yield ourselves to 
the charm, and then imagination sees no more incon- 
gruity in the perverse wooings of the Athenian lovers, 
than in the pranks of Puck, and the quaint devices of 
Oberon for outwitting his wilful Queen of Shadows. 
Shakespeare once believed it all himself, when by the 
Stratford ingle-nook he listened as a boy to nursery 
tales of elves and fairies, such as doubtless some of the 
narrators were ready to swear they had themselves seen 
when the moonlight glanced through the oak-branches, 
and played with flitting light and shadow among the 
cowslips and daisies of Charlecote Chace. 

But there is one character least of all seemingly fitted to 
consort with beings light as air: that most prosaic of 
' rude mechanicals ' and ' human mortals,' Nick Bottom. 
Yet what inimitable power and humorous depth of irony 
are there in the Athenian weaver and prince of clownish 
players ! Vain, conceited, consequential : he is neverthe- 
less no mere empty lout, but rather the impersonation of 



A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 263 

characteristics which have abounded in every age, and 
find ample scope for their display in every social rank. 
Bottom is the work of the same master hand which 
wrought for us the Caliban and Miranda, the Puck and 
Ariel, of such diverse worlds. He is the very embodi- 
ment and idealisation of that self-esteem which is a 
human virtue by no means to be dispensed with, though 
it needs some strong counterpoise in the well-balanced 
mind. In the weak vain man, who fancies everybody is 
thinking of him and looking at him, it takes the name of 
shyness, and claims nearest kin to modesty. With 
robust insensitive vulgarity it assumes an air of uni- 
versal philanthropy and good-fellowship. In the man of 
genius it reveals itself in very varying phases : gives 
to Pope his waspish irritability as a satirist, and crops 
out anew in the transparent mysteries of publication 
of his laboured-impromptu private letters ; betrays 
itself in the self-laudatory exclusiveness which carried 
Wordsworth through long years of detraction and neglect 
to his final triumph ; in the morbid introversions of 
Byron, and his assumed defiance of 'the world's dread 
laugh ' ; in the sturdy self-assertion of Burns, the honest 
faith of the peasant bard, that 

' The rank is but the guinea stamp, 
The man 's the gowd for a' that ! ' 

In Ben Jonson it gave character to the whole man. 
Goldsmith and Chatterton, Hogg and Hugh Miller only 
differed from their fellows in betraying the self-esteem 
which more cunning adepts learn to disguise under 
many a mask, even from themselves. It shines in 
modest prefaces, writes autobiographies and diaries by 
the score, and publishes poems by the hundred — 

' Obliged by hunger and request of friends.' 



264 A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 

Nick Bottom is thus a representative man, ' not one, 
but all mankind's epitome.' He is a natural genius. If 
he claims the lead, it is not without a recognised fitness 
to fulfil the duties he assumes. He is one whom nothing 
can put out. ' I have a device to make all well,' is his 
prompt reply to every difficulty, and the device, such as 
it is, is immediately forthcoming. A duke is but a duke 
after all ; and we may be well assured, when Theseus 
tells the Queen of the Amazons of his welcomers col- 
lapsing in ' the modesty of fearful duty,' Nick Bottom 
had no place in his thoughts : — 

' Where I have come, great clerks have purposed 
To greet me with premeditated welcomes ; 
Where I have seen them shiver and look pale, 
Make periods in the midst of sentences, 
Throttle their practised accent in their fears, 
And in conclusion, dumbly have broke off, 
Not paying me a welcome.' 

As to Bottom, were he the duke, and Theseus the 
clown, he could not take it more coolly. He comes back 
from the fairy brake, ready as ever for the minutest 
details, and prompt for action. No time for talk now. 
' The duke hath dined ; get your apparel together, good 
strings to your beards,' — for a pretty thing it were, if 
your aptly- chosen orange -tawny or French -crown- 
coloured beard were to drop off in the very crisis of the 
tragedy ! ' In any case let Thisby have clean linen ;' and 
poor Snug, the extempore lion, beware of paring his nails. 
' And, most dear actors, eat no onions nor garlic, for we 
are to utter sweet breath, and I do not doubt but to have 
them say it is a sweet comedy.' Bottom is as completely 
conceived, in all perfectness of consistency, as any 
character Shakespeare has drawn : ready-witted, un- 
bounded in his self-confidence, and with a conceit nursed 
into the absolute proportions which we witness by the 



A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 265 

admiring deference of his brother clowns. Yet this is no 
more than the recognition of true merit. Their admira- 
tion of his parts is rendered ungrudgingly, as it is received 
by him simply as his due. Peter Quince appears as 
responsible manager of the theatricals, and indeed is 
doubtless the author of ' the most lamentable comedy.' 
For Nick Bottom, though equal to all else, makes no 
pretensions to the poetic art. He is barely awakened 
out of his fairy-trance, when he begins to cudgel his 
brains. ' Methought I was — there is no man that can 
tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had — but 
man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what 
methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the 
ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to 
taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what 
my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of 
this dream ; it shall be called Bottom's Dream, because 
it hath no bottom ; and I will sing it in the latter end of 
a play, before the duke.' Here there is no mistaking 
the poet of the company. All due recognition of his 
powers is conceded as a matter of course ; but the result 
leads none the less to Bottom's own pre-eminence. The 
ballad is to be ' Bottom's Dream,' and with it he is to 
come in as the climax of the whole performance, before 
the admiring duke. 

Peter Quince is as it were proprietor or lessee of the 
improvised theatre, and assumes accordingly such 
authority as ' the only begetter ' of their comedy must 
needs do. He apportions to Bottom his part of 
Pyramus, and persists in his cast of the play in spite of 
the weaver's ambition to hide his face and play Thisbc ; 
or shew his face and roar in the lion's part, till the duke 
shall say, 'Let him roar again! let him roar again!' 
But it is a point manifestly conceded by all as beyond 



266 A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 

dispute, that without Nick Bottom nothing can be done. 
To the very colour of his beard he is ready for the 
perfect discharge of the lover's part, much as he should 
prefer to play the tyrant. He is prepared for any daring, 
any sacrifice ; if needs be, can undertake Thisbe, and 
speak her to the very life, ' in a monstrous little voice' ; 
or, since his threatened roarings were enough ' to fright 
the duchess and the ladies, and to hang us all,' he ' will 
aggravate his voice so, that he will roar you as gently 
as any sucking dove ; he will roar you an 'twere any 
nightingale.' As to his own specialty of Pyramus, ■ a 
lover that kills himself most gallantly for love,' — rather 
than the ladies shall be put beside themselves with 
fear at the sight of a drawn sword, or the grave tragical 
suicide omitted, he is prepared to announce to the duke 
and his noble auditors, 'for the more better assurance, 
that I Pyramus am not Pyramus, but Bottom the 
weaver.' 

Quince is throughout the literary man. He is to 
' draw a bill of properties such as our play wants ;' and 
to him Bottom turns, as a matter of course, to ' write me 
a prologue, and let the prologue seem to say ' what he 
forthwith dictates. As to the weaver himself, he doubt- 
less does not use to write his name, but has a mark to 
himself, like an honest plain-dealing man. Nevertheless 
poets must be content to be guided by their betters. 
He will dictate the very measure of his prologue, in 
spite of Peter Quince's vocation as laureat. He will 
have none of your alternating eights and sixes ; nothing 
will please him but that it be written in verses of 
eight and eight. He anticipates every difficulty, and is 
ever equal to the occasion. ' To bring in, God shield us ! 
a lion among ladies, is a most dreadful thing ; for there 
is not a more dreadful wild-fowl than your lion living, 



A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 267 

and we ought to look to 't ;' and so he decides that Snug 
must name his name, and shew half his face through the 
lion's neck, and with all soothing entreaties to the ladies 
not to fear, not to tre ble, he is to tell them plainly 
he is Snug the joiner. He looks into the almanac, and 
finds moonshine for them just when wanted ; devises a 
wall for Pyramus and Thisbe, and a cranny through which 
they may whisper ; and when at last Puck sends him 
back from his tiring-room in the thorn-brake, translated 
with the ass's head, the scare of the whole company 
leaves him wholly unaffected. 'I will not stir from this 
place do what they can ; I will walk up and down here 
and I will sing, that they shall here I am not afraid.' 

No wonder, when Bottom could nowhere be heard 
of, all further hope of the performance was at an end. 
There are those in every rank in life whose self- 
reliance is a prop on which all lean. ' If he come 
not,' says Flute, 'then the play is marred. It goes 
not forward, doth it ? ' ' It is not possible,' is Quince's 
reply. He doubtless had him in his eye when he 
wrote the character. ' You have not a man in all 
Athens able to discharge Pyramus but he.' There is 
neither dubiety nor jealousy as to his pre-eminent 
abilities; ' No,' says Flute, as spokesman for the whole, 
' he hath simply the best wit of any handicraft man 
in Athens ; ' and indeed the only point of difference 
between them is whether ' sweet bully Bottom ' shall 
indeed be pronounced, according to Peter Quince's 
eulogium, ' a very paramour for a sweet voice ; ' or 
whether, as Flute will have it, they should not rather 
call him a paragon ; for ' a paramour is, God bless us, 
a thing of naught ! ' Had their sport but gone on, 
they were all made men. Sixpence a day had been 
the undoubted award of such a genius. ' Sixpence a- 



268 A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 

day during life ; he could not have 'scaped sixpence 
a-day. An the Duke had not given him sixpence a- 
day for playing Pyramus,' says the admiring Bellows- 
mender, ' I'll be hanged! He would have deserved it. 
Sixpence a-day in Pyramus, or nothing.' But now 
all is ruined without him, when — ' O most courageous 
day! O most happy hour!' — to the unbounded delight 
of Quince and his whole company, the transmogrified 
weaver turns up again, and all is well. 

But fully to appreciate the ability and self-posses- 
sion of Nick Bottom in the most unwonted circum- 
stances, we must follow the translated mechanical to 
Titania's bower, where the enamoured queen lavishes 
her favours on her strange lover. His cool prosaic 
commonplaces fit in with her rhythmical fancies as 
naturally as the dull grey of the dawn meets and em- 
braces the sunrise. His valiant song awakes Titania 
from her flowery bed amid the fragrance of the wild 
thyme and the nodding violets, while woodbine, sweet 
musk-roses and the eglantine overcanopy her couch ; 
and to her charmed eye the transformed weaver, with 
his ass's nowl, appears an angel. 'What hempen home- 
spuns have we swaggering so near the cradle of the 
fairy Queen?' is Puck's exclamation when he first gets 
sight of Quince's company. Titania, on the contrary, 
awakened by Bottom's carol, exclaims, 'What angel 
wakes me from my flowery bed ?' and so she forthwith 
addresses him : — 

' I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again ; 
Mine ear is much enamour'd of thy note, 
So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape ; 
And thy fair virtue's force perforce doth move me, 
On the first view, to say, to swear, I love thee.' 

' Methinks, mistress,' he replies, — in no way put out by 



A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 269 

such advances, — 'you should have little reason for that. 
And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little 
company together now-a-days. The more the pity 
that some honest neighbours will not make them 
friends.' He is at home at once with the whole fairy 
court, and condescends to his airy attendants with an 
easy gracious familiarity worthy of one to whom the 
favours of Queen Titania come as though they were 
his by right. ' I shall desire more of your acquaint- 
ance, good Master Cobweb,' he says, with a play upon 
his name. Turning to another of the fairy train, 
' Your name, honest gentleman ? ' is his easy salutation. 
With him, in like manner, he has his jest; as apt as 
that of the wise King James, when it pleased him to 
pun in learned fashion with admiring courtiers at Holy- 
rood or Whitehall. ' I pray you commend me to Mis- 
tress Squash, your mother, and to Master Peascod 
your father. Good Master Peaseblossom I shall desire 
you of more acquaintance ; ' and presently the whole 
delicate fairy band are engaged in scratching his ass's 
muzzle. For, as he says to good Monsieur Mustard- 
seed, ' I must to the barber's, monsieur ; for, methinks 
I am marvellous hairy about the- face ; and I am 
such a tender ass, if my hair do but tickle me I must 
scratch.' 

Here we cannot but note the quaint blending of the 
ass with the rude Athenian 'thick-skin': as though the 
creator of Caliban had his own theory of evolution ; 
and has here an eye to the more fitting progenitor of 
man. Titania would know what her sweet love desires 
to eat. ' Truly a peck of provender : I could munch 
your good dry oats. Methinks I have a great desire to 
a bottle of hay. Good hay, sweet hay, hath no fellow.' 
The puzzled fairy queen would fain devise some fitter 



A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 



dainty for her lover. ' I have a venturous fairy,' she 
tells him, 'that shall seek the squirrel's hoard, and 
fetch thee new nuts.' But no ! Bottom has not 
achieved the dignity of that sleek smooth head, and 
those fair large ears, which Titania has been caress- 
ing, and decorating with musk-roses, to miss their befit- 
ting provender. ' I had rather have a handful or two of 
dry peas.' It comes so naturally to him to be an ass ! 
As for the coying of his amiable cheeks, and all the 
other choice attentions of fairy royalty, he takes them 
as a matter of course. ' I pray you, let none of your 
people stir me ; I have an exposition of sleep come 
upon me ; ' and so he dozes off to sleep, with a gentle 
bray, enwound in the doting fairy's arms. When he 
awakes again, he is all alone in the hawthorn brake. 
His first thought is his cue ; as though he had, but 
the moment before, gone, as Peter Quince says, ' to see 
a noise that he heard, and is to come again.' But as he 
finds that all have stolen hence, and left him to his sleep, 
he falls back on his experiences in Wonderland. ' I 
have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, 
past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man 
is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream.' 

Yet though Bottom is an ass, he is no fool. He is 
indeed wrapped up in the supremest ignorance of ' rude 
mechanicals that work for bread upon Athenian stalls.' 
Of such wisdom as belongs to the schools, or was 
taught in the porch, he makes no pretence ; but of 
mother wit he has his full share. His sublime con- 
ceit rests in part on a certain consciousness of innate 
power. He is unabashed by rank, undaunted by diffi- 
culties, ready at a moment's notice for all emergencies, 
thoroughly cool and self-reliant. No wonder that he 
can look a duke in the face. He has been accustomed 



A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 



to take the lead among his fellow mechanics, and to 
have his counsels followed as a matter of course. Nick 
Bottom is a natural genius, of a type by no means 
rare. There is a consequential aldermanic absolutism 
about him, familiar to many a civic council-board. He 
gives his opinions on the play, in all its intricacies 
and perplexities, with an infallibility which no Shake- 
spearean commentator could surpass. ' Tis a very good 
piece of work, and a merry ; ' though his own part 
' will ask some tears in the true performing of it.' 
Duke Theseus, when witnessing the actual performance, 
ventures on a comment ; but Bottom, in the midst of 
his most tender Pyramus-vein, is ready with his ' No, 
in truth, sir,' and will play, not only actor, but com- 
mentator too. 

There are Bottoms everywhere. Nor are they with- 
out their uses. Vanity becomes admirable when carried 
out with such sublime unconsciousness ; and here it is 
a vanity resting on some solid foundation, and finding 
expression in the assumption of a leadership which 
his fellows recognise as his own by right. If he will 
play the lion's part, ' let him roar again ! ' Look 
where we will, we may chance to come on ' sweet 
bully Bottom.' In truth there is so much of genuine 
human nature in this hero of ' A Midsummer Night's 
Dream,' that it may not always be safe to peep into 
the looking-glass, lest evolution reassert itself for our 
special behoof, and his familiar countenance greet us, 
' Hail fellow, well met, give me your neif ! ' 



INDEX 



Anaxagoias, 141. 
Anaximander, 141. 
Andaman Islanders, 14. 
Anthropophagi. 45, 73. 
Antipodes, 70. 
Arafuras, 103. 
Arbrousset, M., 105. 
Ariel, 46, 48, 60, 81, 1; 
Atlantis, the, 37. 
Australian, the, 28, 142 



[46; 



Bacon, 10. 
Ballads, Scottish, : 
Berkeley, 3. 
Bik, M., 103. 
Borneo, 43. 
Bottom, Nick, 175 
Brain, Gorilla's, 2: 
„ Orang's, 24. 
Human, 21, 24. 
Browne, Sir T., 4, 11. 
Browning, 12, 94, 107 
Burns, 167. 
Burton, Captain, 140, 



2, 264. 



24. 



[36, 144. 



Carib, 72. 

Collier, J. P., 200, 225, 2, 
Columbus, 70, 79. 
Commentators, the, 194. 
Craik, Prof., 206. 
Creeds, 133, 139, 143. 
Cunningham, Allan, 168. 



D'Avenant, 59, 6r, 62. 206. 
Davy, Sir H., 8, 123. 
Death, 114, 121. 
Democritus, 2. 
Dog, the, 96. 
Dreams, 128. 
Driopethecus, 19. 
Dryden, 10, 59, 61, 137, 216. 
Duncan, Dr. J., 94. 

Eden, R., 53. 
Engis skull, 22. 
Ewaipanoma, 45. 

Fairies, 166. 
Faith, 125. 
Figuier, L./7. 
Fire-making, 16, 80. 
Fletcher, 62. 
Folios, the, 211. 
Fuegians, 31, 32. 

Gervinus, 80, [37. 
Ghosts, 155. 
God, Idea of, 95, 133. 
Gorilla, 21, 24, 29. 
Griffon, the, 15. 



Harriott, Thos., 49. 
Hazlitt, So, 137. 
His, the neuter, 250. 



2/4 



INDEX. 



Hobbes, 10. 

Hogg, 169. 

Horn, Franz, 14. 

Hunter, Mr. J., 45, 50, 74, 205, 218. 

Huxley, 20, 23. 



Immortality, belief in, 125, 
Indians, American, 33, 104. 
Ipotaynes, 15. 



Kaffirs, 106. 

Knight, C, 218, 220, 240. 



Lampedusa, 45. 

Lane, Ralph, 49. 

Laud, Dr., 101. 

Linnseus, 17. 

Lubbock, 23, 95, 140, 142. 

Lyell, 23. 



Magic, 81, 82. 
Mandeville, 14. 
Meres, 191. 
Metre, 200, 209. 
Midsummer Night's Dream, 

239- 
Milton, 171. 
Mind, 92, 137. 
Miranda, 56, 59, 76. 
Montaigne, 52. 
Moral Sense, the, 20, 1 34. 
More, Sir T., 52. 



Neanderthal skull, 22. 



134- 
106. 



67, 165, 



Orang, the, 17. 
Owen, 21. 



Polo, Marco, 14. 
Pongo, the, 16, So. 
Pope, 58, 195, 204, 263. 
Prospero, 13, 76, 80. 
Puck, 166, 182. 
Purchas, 15, 
Purgatory, 146, 156. 

Raleigh, 45, 69. 
Religion, 95, 101, 139. 
Rhythm, 200, 209. 
Rowe, Nicholas, 213, 242. 



Salamanca council, 70. 
Schlegel, 80, 137. 
Scottish ballads, 146, 148. 
Sekesa, 105. 
Setebos, 53, 98, 100. 
Spencer, H., 128. 
Spenser, 69. 
Supernatural, the, 124, 140. 

Tamlane, 147, 148. 

Tempest, the 13, 55, 147, 222. 

Tennyson, 126. 

Theobald, 58, 194, 200, 221. 

Utopia, 52. 



Warburton, 196. 
White, R. G., 222, 2; 
Witches, 147, 222. 



Bedford Street, Covent Garden, London, 
April 1872. 



Ma Camilla n a- Co.'s Catalogue of Works 
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including Pure and Affiled Mathe- 
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Chemistry, Zoology, Botany; Physiology, 
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MATHEMATICS. 



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Ball (R. S., A.M.)— EXPERIMENTAL MECHANICS. A 

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A 2 



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MA THE MA TICS. 



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more easily remembered. It is also a powerful instrument in the 
solution of a large class of problems relating to these curves. 



SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. 



Morgan.— A COLLECTION OF PROBLEMS AND EXAM- 
PLES IN MATHEMATICS. With Answers. By H. A. 
Morgan, M.A., Sadlerian and Mathematical Lecturer of Jesus 
College, Cambridge. Crown 8vo. cloth. 6s. 6d. 

This book contains a number of problems, chiefly elementary, in the 
Mathematical subjects ttsttally read at Cambridge. They have been 
selected from the Papers set during late years at fesus College. Very 
few of them are to be met with in other collections, and by far the 
larger number are due to some of the most distinguished Mathe- 
maticians in the University. 

Newton's Principia. — 4 to. cloth. 315. 6d. 

It is a sufficient guarantee of the reliability of this complete edition of 
Nezvton's Principia that it has been printed for and under the care 
of Professor Sir William Thomson and Professor Blackburn, of 
Glasgoiv University. The following notice is prefixed : — ' ' Finding 
that all the editions of the Principia are nozv out of print, we have 
been induced to reprint Newton's last edition [of 1 726] zvithout note 
or comment, only introducing the ' Corrigenda ' of the old copy and 
correcting typographical errors." The book is of a handsome size, 
with large type, fine thick paper, and cleanly-cut figures, and is 
the only rece?it edition containing the zvhole of Newton's great 
work. 

Parkinson. — Works by S. Parkinson, D.D., F.R.S., Fellow 
and Tutor of St. John's College, Cambridge : — 

AN ELEMENTARY TREATISE ON MECHANICS. For the 
Use of the Junior Classes at the University and the Higher Classes 
in Schools. With a Collection of Examples. Fourth Edition, 
revised. Crown 8vo. cloth, gs. 6d. 

In preparing a fourth edition of this work the author has kept the 
same object in view as he had in the former editions — namely, to in- 
clude in it such portions of Theoretical Mechanics as can be con- 
veniently investigated without the use of the Differential Calculus, 
and so render it suitable as a manual for the junior classes in the 
University and the higher classes in Schools, With one or two short 
exceptioits, the student is not presumed to require a knowledge of any 
branches of Mathematics beyond the elements of Algebra, Geometry, 



MA THEM A TICS. 



Parkinson (S.)— continued. 

and Trigonometry. Several additional propositions have been in- 
corporated in the work for the purpose of rendering it more complete, 
and the collection of Examples and Problems has been largely in- 
creased. 

A TREATISE OX OPTICS. Third Edition, revised and en- 
larged. Crown Svo. cloth. 10s. 6d. 

A collection of Examples and Problems has been appended to this work, 
■which are sufficiently numerous and varied in character to afford 
useful exercise for the student. For the greater part of them, re- 
course has been had to the Examination Papers set in the University 
and the several Colleges during the last twenty years. 

Phear.— ELEMENTARY HYDROSTATICS. With Numerous 
Examples. By J. E. Phear, M.A., Fellow and late Assistant 
Tutor of Clare College, Cambridge. Fourth Edition. Crown Svo. 
cloth. 5-f. 6d. 

This edition has been carefully rei'ised throughout, and many new 
Illustrations and Examples added, which it is hoped will increase 
its usefulness to students at the Universities and in Schools. In ac- 
cordance with suggestions from many engaged in tuition, answers to 
all the Examples have been given at the end of the booh. 

Pratt. — A TREATISE ON ATTRACTIONS, LAPLACE'S 
FUNCTIONS, AND THE FIGURE OF THE EARTH. 
By John H. Pratt, M.A., Archdeacon of 'Calcutta, Author of 
"The Mathematical Principles of Mechanical Philosophy. " Fourth 
Edition. Crown Svo. cloth. 6s. 6d. 

The author's chief design in this treatise is to give an answer to the 
question, " Has the Earth acquired Us present form from being 
originally in a fluid state?'' This edition is a complete revision of 
the former ones. 

Puckle.— AN ELEMENTARY TREATISE ON CONIC SEC- 
TIONS AND ALGEBRAIC GEOMETRY. With numerous 
Examples and Hints for their Solution ; especially designed for the 
Use of Beginners. By G. II. Puckle, M.A., Head Master of 



SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. 



Windermere College. New Edition, revised and enlarged. 
Crown 8vo. cloth. Js. 6d. 

This work is recommended by the Syndicate of the Cambridge Local 
Examinations, and is the text-book in Harvard University, U.S. 
The Athenaeum says the author "displays an intimate acquaint- 
ance with the difficulties likely to. be felt, together with a singular 
aptitude hi removing them." 

Routh. — AN ELEMENTARY TREATISE ON THE DYNA- 
MICS OF THE SYSTEM OF RIGID BODIES. With 
numerous Examples. By Edward John Routh, M.A., late 
Fellow and Assistant Tutor of St. Peter's College, Cambridge ; 
Examiner in the University of London. Second Edition, enlarged. 
Crown 8vo. cloth. 14s. 

In this edition the author has made several additions to each chapter : 
he has tried, even at the risk of some little repetition, to make each 
chapter, as far as possible, complete in itself, so that all that relates 
to any one part of the subject may be found in the same place. This 
arrangement will enable every student to select his own order in 
which to read the subject. The Examples which will be found at 
the end of each chapter have been chiefly selected from the Examina- 
tion Papers which have been set in the University and the Colleges 
in the last few years. 

Smith's (Barnard) Works. — See Educational Cata- 
logue. 

Smith (J. Brook.)— ARITHMETIC IN THEORY AND 
PRACTICE. By J. Brook Smith, M.A., LL.B., St. John's 
College, Cambridge ; Barrister-at-Law ; one of the Masters of 
Cheltenham College. Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. 

Writers on Arithmetic at the present day feel the necessity of explaining 
the principles on which the rules of the subject are based, but few as 
yet feel the necessity of making these explanations strict and complete ; 
or, failing that, of distinctly pointing out their defective character. 
If the science of Arithmetic is to be made an effective instrument in 
developing and strengthening the mental powers, it ought to be 
worked out rationally and conclusively ; and in this work the 
author has endeavoured to reason out in a clear and accurate 



MATHEMATICS. 13 



manner the leading propositions of the science, and to illustrate and 
apply those prepositions in practice. In the practical part of the 
subject he has advanced somewhat beyond the majority of pr, 
writers ; particularly in Division, in Greatest Common, Measure, 
in Cube Root, in the chapters on Decimal Money and the Metric 
System, and more especially in the application of Decimals to Per- 
centages and cognate subjects. Copious examples, original and 
selected, are given. 

Snowball.— THE ELEMENTS OF PLANE AND SPHERI- 
CAL TRIGONOMETRY ; with the Construction and Use of 
Tables of Logarithms. By J. C. Snowball, M.A. Tenth 
Edition. Crown 8vo. cloth, js. 6d, 

In preparing the present edition for the press, the text has been sub- 
jected to a careful revision ; the proofs of some of the more import- 
ant propositions have been rendered more strict and general ; and 
a considerable addition of more than /too hundred examples, taken 
principally from the questions set of late years in the public exami- 
nations of the University and of individual Colleges, has been made 
to the collection of Examples and Problems for practice. 

Tait and Steele. — dynamics of a particle. With 

numerous Examples. By Professor Tait and Mr. Steele. New 

Edition. Crown . 8vo. cloth. IOt. 6d, 

In this treatise will be found all the ordinary propositions, connected 
with the Dynamics of Particles, which can be conveniently deduced 
without the use of D'Alembert's Principle. Throughout the book 
will be found a number of illustrative examples introduced in the 
text, and for the most part completely worked out ; others with occa- 
sional solutions or hints to assist the student are appended to each 
chapter. For by far the greater portion of these, the Cambridge 
Senate-House and College Examination Papers have been applied to. 

Taylor. — GEOMETRICAL CONICS ; including Anharmonic 
Ratio and Projection, with numerous Examples. By C. Taylor, 
B. A., Scholar of St. John's College, Cambridge. Crown Svo. 
cloth, p. 6d. 

This iaork contains elementary proof of the principal properties op 
1 ' nic Sections, together with chapters on Projection and Anharmonic 
Ratio. 



14 SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. 



Todhunter.— Works by I. Todhunter, M.A., F.R.S., of 
St. John's College, Cambridge : — 

"Perspicuous language, vigorous investigations, scrutiny of difficulties, 
and methodical treatment, characterize Mr. Todhunter 1 s works." — 
Civil Engineer. 

THE ELEMENTS OF EUCLID; MENSURATION FOR 
BEGINNERS; ALGEBRA FOR BEGINNERS; TRIGO- 
NOMETRY FOR BEGINNERS; MECHANICS FOR 
BEGINNERS. — See Educational Catalogue. 

ALGEBRA. For the Use of Colleges and Schools. Fifth Edition. 
Crown 8vo. cloth, "js. 6d. 

This work contains all the propositions which are usually included in 
elementary treatises on Algebra, and a large number of Examples 
for Exercise. The author has sought to render the work easily in- 
telligible to students, without impairing the accuracy of the demon- 
strations, or contracting the limits of the subject. The Examples, 
about Sixteen hundred and fifty in number, have been selected with 
a view to illustrate every fart of the subject. The work will be 
found peculiarly adapted to the wants of students who are without 
the aid of a teacher. The Answers to the Examples, with hints 
for the solution of some in which assistance may be needed, are 
given at the end of the book. In the present edition two New 
Chapters and Three hundred miscellaneous Examples have been 
added. "It has merits which unquestionably place it first in the 
class to which it belongs." — Educator. 

KEY TO ALGEBRA FOR THE USE OF COLLEGES AND 
SCHOOLS. Crown Svo. iar. 6d. 

AN ELEMENTARY TREATISE ON THE THEORY OF 
EQUATIONS. Second Edition, revised. Crown 8vo. cloth. 
is. 6d. 

This treatise contains all the propositions which are usually included 
in elementary treatises on the theory of Equations, together with 
Examples for exercise. These have been selected fro?n the College 
and University Examination Papers, and the results have been 
given when it appeared necessary. In order to exhibit a compre- 
hensive view of the subject, the treatise includes investigations which 
are not found in all the preceding elementary treatises, and also 



MATHEMATICS. 



Todhunter {I.)— continued. 

some investigations which are not to be found in any of them. For 
the second edition the toork has been revised and some additions 
have been made, the most important being an account of the Re- 
searches of Professor Sylvester respecting Neiutoiis Rule. "A 
thoroughly trustworthy, complete, and yet not too elaborate treatise." 
— Philosophical Magazine. 

PLANE TRIGONOMETRY. For Schools and Colleges. Fourth 
Edition. Crown 8vo. cloth. $s. 

TTie design of this work has been to render the subject intelligible 
to beginners, and at the same time to afford the student the oppor- 
tunity of obtaining all the information which he will require on 
this branch of Mathematics. Each chapter is follotved by a set 
of Examples : those which are entitled Miscellaneous Examples, 
together with a few in some of the other sets, may be advantageously 
reserved by the student for exercise after he has made some progress 
in the subject. In the Second Edition the hints for the solution of 
the Examples have been considerably increased. 

A TREATISE ON SPHERICAL TRIGONOMETRY. Third 
Edition, enlarged. Crown 8vo. cloth. 4s. 6d. 

The present work is constructed on the same plan as the treatise on 
Plane Trigonometry, to which it is intended as a sequel. In the 
account of Napier's Rules of circidar parts, an explanation has 
been given of a method of proof devised by Napier, which seems to 
have been overlooked by most modern writers on the subject. Con- 
siderable labour has been bestmved on the text in order to retider it 
comprehensive and accurate, and the Examples (selected chiefly 
from College Examination Papers) have all been carefidly verified. 
" For educational purposes this work seems to be superior to any 
others on the subject." — Critic. 

PLANE CO-ORDINATE GEOMETRY, as applied to the Straight 
Line and the Conic Sections. With numerous Examples. Fourth 
Edition, revised and enlarged. Crown 8vo. cloth, fs. 6d. 

The author has here endeavoured to exhibit the subject in a simple 
manner for the benefit of beginners, and at the same time to include 
in one volume all that students usually require. In addition, 
therefore, to the propositions which have always appeared in such 



i6 SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. 



Todhunter (I.)— continued. 

treatises, he has introduced the methods of abridged notation, 
which are of more recent origin : these methods, which are of a 
less elementary character than the rest of the work, are placed in 
separate chapters, and may be omitted by the student at first. 

A TREATISE ON THE DIFFERENTIAL CALCULUS. 
With numerous Examples. Fifth Edition. Crown 8vo. cloth. 
10s. 6d. 

The author has endeavoured in the present work to exhibit a compre- 
hensive view of the Differential Calculus on the method of limits. 
In the more elementary portions he has entered into considerable 
detail-in the explanations, with the hope-that a reader who is without 
the assistance of a tutor may be enabled to acquire a competent ac- 
quaintance with the subject. The method adopted is that of Dif- 
ferential Coefficients. To the different chapters are appended 
Examples sufficiently nume?-ous to render another book unnecessary ; 
these Examples being mostly selected from College Examination 
Tapers. This and the following work have been translated into 
Italian by Trofessor Battaglini, who in his Treface speaks thus :- — 
"In publishing this translation of the Differential and Integral 
Calculus of Air. Todhunter, we have had no other object than to 
add to the books which are in the hands of the students of our Uni- 
versities, a work remarkable for the clearness of the exposition, the 
rigour of the demonstrations, the just proportion in the parts, and 
the rich store of examples which offer a large field for useful 
exercise." 

A TREATISE ON THE INTEGRAL CALCULUS AND ITS 
APPLICATIONS. With numerous Examples. Third Edition,, 
revised and enlarged. Crown 8vo. cloth. 10s. 6d. 

This is designed as a work at once elementary and complete, adaptea 
for the use of beginners, and sufficient for the wants of advanced 
students. In the selection of the propositions, and in the mode of 
establishing them, it has been sought to exhibit the principles clearly, 
and to illustrate all their most important results. The process of 
summation has been repeatedly brought for-ward, with the view 
of securing the attention of the student to the notioits which form the 
true foundation of the Calculus itself, as well as of its most 
valuable applications. Every attempt has been made to. explain those- 



MATHEMATICS. 17 



Todhunter (I.)— continued. 

difficulties which usually perplex beginners, especially with reference 
to the limits of integrations. A new method has been adopted in 
regard to the transformation of multiple integrals. The last chapter 
deals with the Caladus of Variations. A large collection of Exer- 
cises, selected from College Examination Papers, has been appended 
to the several chapters. 

EXAMPLES OF ANALYTICAL GEOMETRY OF THREE 
DIMENSIONS. Second Edition, revised. Crown Svo. .cloth. 4s. 

A TREATISE ON ANALYTICAL STATICS. With numerous 
Examples. Third Edition, revised and enlarged. Crown Svo. 
cloth. 10s. 6d. 

In this work on Statics (treating of the laws of the equilibrium 
bodies) will be found all the propositions which usually appear in 
treatises on Theoretical Statics. To the different chapters Examples 
are appended, which have been principally selected from University 
Examination Papers. In the Third Edition many additions have 
been made, in order to illustrate the application of the principles of 
the subject to the solution of problems. 

A HISTORY OF THE MATHEMATICAL THEORY OF 
PROBABILITY, from the Time of Pascal to that of Laplace. 
Svo. iSs. 

The subject of this work has high claims to consideration 071 account 
of the subtle problems which it involves, the valuable contributions 
to analysis which it has produced, its important practical applica- 
tions, and the eminence of those who have cultivated it; nearly 
every great mathematician within the range of a century and 
a half comes under consideration in the course of the history. The 
author has endeavoured to be quite accurate in his statements, and 
to reproduce the essential elements of the original works which he 
has analysed. Besides being a history, the work may claim the title 
of a comprehensive treatise on the Theory of Probability, for it 
assumes in the reader only so much knenvledge as can be gained from 
an elementary book on Algebra, and introduces him to almost every 
p?-ocess and every special problein which the literahire of the subject 
can furnish. 

RESEARCHES IN THE CALCULUS OF VARIATIONS, 
Principally on the Theory of Discontinuous Solutions : An Essay 



SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. 



Todhuilter (I.)— continued. 

to which the Adams' Prize was awarded in the University of 
Cambridge in 1871. 8vo. 6s. 

The subject of this Essay was prescribed in the following terms by the 
Examiners : — "A determination of the circumstances under which 
discontinuity of any kind presents itself in the solution of a problem 
of maximum or minimum in the Calculus of Variations, and 
applications to particular instances. It is expected that the discus- 
sion of the instances should be exemplified as far as possible geo- 
metrically, and that attention be especially directed to cases of real or 
supposed failure of the Calculus.'''' While the Essay is thus mainly 
devoted to the consideration of discontinuous solutions, various 
other questions in the Calculus of Variations are examined and 
elucidated ; and the author hopes he has definitely contributed to the 
extension and impi-ovement of our knowledge of this refined depart* 
ment of analysis. 

Wilson (W. P.) — A TREATISE ON DYNAMICS. By 
W. P. Wilson, M.A., Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, 
and Professor of Mathematics in Queen's College, Belfast. 8vo. 
gs. 6d. 

Wolstenholme. — A BOOK OF MATHEMATICAL 
PROBLEMS, on Subjects included in the Cambridge Course. 
By Joseph Wolstenholme, Fellow of Christ's College, some 
time Fellow of St. John's College, and lately Lecturer in Mathe- 
matics at Christ's College. Crown 8vo. cloth. 8s. 6d. 

Contents : — Geometry (Euclid) — Algebra — Plane Trigonometry — 
Geometrical Conic Sections — Analytical Conic Sections — Theory of 
Equations — Differential Calculus — Integral Calculus — Solid Geo- 
metry — Status — Elementary Dynamics — Newton — Dynamics of a 
Point — Dynamics of a Rigid Body — Hydrostatics — Geometrical 
Optics — Spherical Trigonometry and Plane Astronomy. In some 
cases the author has prefixed to certain classes of problems frag- 
mentary notes on the mathematical subjects to which they relate. 
il Judicious, symmetrical, and well arranged.'" — Guardian. 



PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 

Airy (G. B.) — POPULAR ASTRONOMY. With Illustrations. 
By G. B. Airy, Astronomer Royal. Seventh 'and cheaper Edition. 
iSmo. cloth. 45-. 6d. 

This work consists of Six Lectures, which are intended ' ' to explain 
to intelligent persons the principles on -which the instruments of an 
Observatory are constructed (omitting all details, so far as they are 
merely subsidiary), and the principles on which the observations 
made with these instruments are treated for deduction of the distances 
and weights of the bodies of the Solar System, and of a few stars, 
omitting all minutiez of formulae, and all troublesome details of 
calculation." The speciality of this volume is the direct reference of 
every step to the Observatory, and the full description of the methods 
and instruments of observation. 

Bastian (H. C. M.D., F.R.S.)— TPIE MODES OF 
ORIGIN OF LOWEST ORGANISMS : Including a Discussion 
of the Experiments of M. Pasteur, and a reply to some Statements 
by Professors Huxley and Tyndall. By H. Charlton Bastian, 
M.D., F.R.S., Professor of Pathological Anatomy in University 
College, London, etc. Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. 

The present volume contains a fragment of the evidence which will be 
embodied in a much larger work — now almost completed — relating to 
the nature and origin of living matter, and in favour of what is 
termed the Physical Doctrine of Life. ' ' It is a work worthy of the 
highest respect, and places its author in the very first class of scientific 
physicians. . . . It would be difficult to name an instance in which 
skill, knowledge, perseverance, and great reasoning pozver have been 
more happily applied to the investigation of a complex biological 
problem." — British Medical Journal. 



SCIENTIFIC CATALO G US. 



Birks (R. B.)— ON MATTER AND ETHER; or, The Secret 
Laws of Physical Change. By Thomas Rawson Birks, M.A., 
Rector of Kelshall, Herts, formerly Fellow of Trinity College, 
Cambridge. Crown 8vo. $s. 6d. 

The author believes that the hypothesis of the existence of besides matter, 
a luminous ether, of immense elastic force, supplies the true and suf- 
ficient key to the remaining secrets of inorganic matter, of the phe- 
nomena of light, electricity, etc. In this treatise the author endea- 
vours first to form a clear and definite conception with regard to the 
real nature both of matter and ether, and the laws of mutual action 
which must be supposed to exist between them. He then endeavours 
to trace out the main consequences of the fundamental hypothesis, 
and their correspondence with the known phenomena of physical 
change. 

Blanford (W. T.)— GEOLOGY AND ZOOLOGY OF 
ABYSSINIA. By W. T. Blanford. Svo. 21s. 

This work contains an account of the Geological and Zoological Obser- 
vations made by the author in Abyssinia, when accompanying the 
British Army on its march to Magdala and back in 1868, and 
during a short journey in Northern Abyssinia, after the departure 
of the troops. Part I. Personal Narrative; Part II. Geology; 
Part III. Zoology. With Coloured Illustrations and Geological 
Map. ' ' The result of his labours, " the Academy says, " is an 
i7?iportant contribution to the natural history of the country." 



Cooke (Josiah P., Jun.)— FIRST PRINCIPLES OF 
CHEMICAL PHILOSOPHY. By Josiah P. Cooke, Jun., 
. Ei-vine Professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy in Harvard College. 
Crown 8vo. 12s. 

The object of the author in this book is to pj-esent the philosophy of 
Chemistry in such a form that it can be made with profit the subject 
of College recitations, and furnish the teacher with, the means of 
testing the shident's faithfulness and ability. With this view the 
subject has been developed in a logical order, and the principles of 
the science are taught independently of the experimental evidence on 
which they rest. 



PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 



Cocke (M. C.)— HANDBOOK OF BRITISH FUNGI, 
with full descriptions of all the Species, and Illustrations of the 
Genera. By M. C. Cooke, M.A. Two vols, crown Svo. 24J. 

During the thirty -five years that have elapsed since the appearance of 
the last complete Mycologic Flora no attempt has been made to revise 
it, to incorporate species since discovered, and to bring it up to the 
standard of modern science. A T o apology, therefore, is necessary for 
the present effort, since all will admit that the -want of such a 
manual has long been felt, and this work makes its appearance 
tinder the advantage that it seeks to occupy a place which has long 
been vacant. No effort has been spared to make the work worthy 
of confidence, and, by the publication of an occasional supplement, 
it is hoped to maintain it for many years as the "Handbook" 
for every student of British Fungi. Appended is a complete alpha- 
betical Index of all the divisions and subdivisions of the Fungi 
noticed in the text. The book contains 400 figures. " Will main- 
tain its place as the standard English book, on the subject of which 
it treats, for many years to come.' 1 '' — Standard. 

Dawson (J. W.)— ACADIAN GEOLOGY. The Geologic 
Structure, Organic Remains, and Mineral Resources of Nova 
Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. By John 
William Dawson, M.A., LL.D., F.R.S., F.G.S., Principal and 
Vice-Chancellor of M'Gill College and University, Montreal, &c. 
Second Edition, revised and enlarged. With a Geological Map 
and numerous Illustrations. Svo. i8j. 

The object of the first edition of this work was to place within the 
reach of the people of the districts to which it relates, a popular 
account of the more recent discoveries in the geology and mineral 
resources of their country, and at the same time to give to geologists 
in other countries a connected view of the structure of a very in- 
teresting portion of the American Continent, in its relation to 
general and theoretical Geology. In the present edition, it is hoped this 
design is still more completely fulfilled, with reference to the present 
more advanced condition of knowledge. The author has endea- 
voured to convey a knowledge of the structure and fossils of the 
region in such a manner as to be intelligible to ordinary readers, 
and lias devoted much attention to all questions relating to the nature 
and present or prospective value of deposits of useful minerals. 



SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. 



Besides a large coloured Geological Map of the district, the work 
is illustrated by upwards of 260 cuts of sections, fossils, animals, 
etc. "The book will doubtless find a place in the library, not only 
of the scientific geologist, but also of all who are desirous of the in- 
dustrial progress and commercial prosperity of the Acadian pro- 
vinces." — Mining Journal. "A style at once popular and scientific. 
. . . A valuable addition to our store of geological knowledge." — 
Guardian. 

Flower (W. H.)— AN INTRODUCTION TO THE OSTE- 
OLOGY OF THE MAMMALIA. Being the substance of the 
Course of Lectures delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons 
of England in 1870. By W. H. Flower, F.R.S., F.R.C.S., 
Hunterian Professor of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology. 
With numerous Illustrations. Globe 8vo. Js. 6d. 

Although the present work contains the substance of a Course of Lectures, 
the form has been changed, so as the better to adapt it as a hand- 
book for students. Theoretical vieivs have been almost entirely ex- 
cluded: and while it is impossible in a scientific treatise to avoid the 
employment of technical terms, it has been the author's endeavour to 
use no 7nore than absolutely necessary, and to exercise due care in 
selecting only those that seem most appropriate, or which have re- 
ceived the sanction op general adoption. With a very few) excep- 
tions the illustrations have been drawn expressly for this work from 
specimens in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. 

GaltOtl. — Works by Francis Galton, F.R.S. :— 

METEOROGRAPHICA, or Methods of Mapping the Weather. 
Illustrated by upwards of 600 Printed Lithographic Diagrams. 
4to. gs. 

As Mr. Galton entertains strong views on the necessity of Meteorolo- 
gical Charts and Maps, he determined, as a practical proof of what 
could be done, to chart the entire area of Europe, so far as meteorological 
stations extend, during one month, vis. the month of December, 1861. 
Mr. Galton got his data from authorities in every part of Britain 
and the Continent, and on the basis of these has here drawn up 
nearly a hundred different Maps and Charts, showing the state of 
the weather all over Europe during the above period. ' ' If the 
various Governments and scientific bodies would perform for the 



PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 23 

Galton (F.)— continued. 

-whole world for two or three years what, at a great cost and labour, 
Mr. Gallon has done for a part of Europe for one month, Meteoro- 
logy would soon eease to be made a joke of." — Spectator. 

HEREDITARY GENIUS : An Inquiry into its Laws and Con- 
sequences. Demy 8vo. \2s. 

" J propose," the author says, "to show in this book that a man's 
natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same 
limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic 
world. I shall show that social agencies of an ordinary character, 
whose influences are little suspected, are at this moment -working 
irds the degradation of human nature, and that others are 
working towards its improvement. The general plan of my argu- 
ment is to shozu that high reputation is a pretty accurate test of high 
ability ; next, to discuss the relationships of a large body of fairly 
eminent men, and to obtain from these a general survey of the lazvs 
of heredity in respect of genius. Then will follow a short chapter, 
by way of comparison, on the hereditary transmission of physical 
gifts, as deduced from the relationships of certain classes of oarsmen 
and wrestlers. Lastly, 1 shall collate my results and draw conclu- 
sions." The Times calls it "a -most able and most interesting 
book;" and Mr. Darwin, in his "Descent of Man" (vol. \. p. inj, 
says, ' ' We know, through the admirable labours of Mr. Galton, 
that Genius tends to be inherited." 

Geikie(A.)— SCENERY OF SCOTLAND, Viewed in Connec- 
tion with its Physical Geography. With Illustrations and a new 
Geological Map. By Archibald Geikie, Professor of Geology 
in the University of Edinburgh. Crown 8vo. 10s. 6d. 

" We can confidently recommend Mr. Geikie 's -work to those who wish 
to look bclcnu the surface and read the physical history of the Scenery 
of Scotland by the light of modern science." — Saturday Review. 
"Amusing, picturesque, and instructive." — Times. 

Hooker (Dr.)— THE STUDENT'S FLORA OF THE 
BRITISH ISLANDS. By J. D. Hooker, C.B., F.R.S., 
M.D., D.C.L., Director of the Royal Gardens, Kew. Globe Svo. 
XOs. 6d. 



24 SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. 



The object of this zvork is to supply students and field-botanists with a 
fuller account of the Plants of the British Islands than the manuals 
hitherto in use ai?n at giving. The Ordinal, Generic, and Specific 
characters have been re-written, and are to a great extent original, 
and drawn from living or dried specimens, or both. ' ' Cannot fail to 
perfectly fulfil the purpose for which it is intended" — Land and 
Water. ' ' Containing the fullest and most accurate manual of the 
kind that has yet appeared." — Pall Mall Gazette. 

Huxley (Professor). — LAY SERMONS, ADDRESSES, 
AND REVIEWS. By T. H. Huxley, LL.D., F.R.S. New 
and Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo. Js. 6d. 

Fourteen Discourses on the following subjects: — (i) On the Advisable- 
ness of Improving Natural Knowledge : — (2) Emancipation — 
Black and White: — (3) A Liberal Education, and where to find 
it:- — (4) ScientificEducation : — (5) On the Educational Value of 
the Natural History Sciences: — (6) On the Study of Zoology: — 
(7) On the Physical Basis of Life: — (8) The Scientific Aspects of 
Positivism: — (9) On a Piece of Chalk: — (10) Geological Contem- 
poraneity and Persistent Types of Life : — ( 11) Geological Reform : — 
(12) The Origin of Species ."—(13) Criticisms on the " Origin of 
Species:" — (14) On Descartes' " Discourse touching the Method of 
using One's Reason rightly and of seeking Scietttific Truth. " The 
momentous influence exercised by Mr. Huxley 's writings on physical, 
mental, and social science is universally acknowledged ; his works 
must be studied by all who would comprehend the various drifts of 
modern thought. 

ESSAYS SELECTED FROM LAY SERMONS, ADDRESSES, 
AND REVIEWS. Crown 8vo. u. 

This volume includes Nwnbers 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, and 14, of the above. 

LESSONS IN ELEMENTARY PHYSIOLOGY. With numerous 
Illustrations. Fourteenth Thousand. i8mo. cloth. 45-. 6d. 

This book describes and explains, in a series of graduated lessons, the 
principles of Human Physiology, or the Structure and Functions 
of the Human Body. The first lesson supplies a general view of- 
the subject. This is followed by sections on the Vascular or Venous 
System, and the Circulation ; the Blood and the Lymph ; Respira- 



PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 



Hon : Soitrces of Loss and of Gain to the Blood ; the Function of 
Alimentation ; Motion and Locomotion ; Sensations and Sensory 
Organs ; the Organ of Sight ; the Coalescence of Sensations with 
one another and with other States of Consciousness ; the Nervous 
System and Innervation ; Histology, or the Minute Structure of 
the Tissues. A Table of Anatomical and Physiological Constants 
is appended. The lessons are fully illustrated by numerous en 
gravings. " Pure gold throughout." — Guardian. " Unquestion- 
ably the clearest and most complete elementary treatise on this subject 
that we possess in any language." — Westminster Review. 

Kirchhoff (G.)— RESEARCHES ON THE SOLAR SPEC- 
TRUM, and the Spectra of the Chemical Elements. By. G. 
Kirchhoff, Professor of Physics in the University of Heidelberg. 
Second Part. Translated, with the Author's Sanction, from the 
Transactions of the Berlin Academy for 1862, by Henry R. 
Roscoe, B.A., Ph.D., F.R.S., Professor of Chemistry in Owens 
College, Manchester. 

"It is to Kirchhoff we are indebted for by far the best and most accurate, 
observations of these phenomena.'" — Edin. Review. " This memoir 
seems almost indispensable to every Spectrum observer." — Philo- 
sophical Magazine. 

Lockyer (J. N.)— ELEMENTARY LESSONS IN AS- 
TRONOMY. With numerous Illustrations. By J. Norman 
Lockyer, F.R.S. Eighth Thousand. iSmo. $s.6d. 

The author has here aimed to give a connected view of the whole subject, 
and to supply facts, and ideas founded on the facts, to serve as a basis 
for subsequent study and disctission. The chapters treat of the 
Stars and Nebula:; the Sun; the Solar System ; Apparent Move- 
ments of the Heavenly Bodies ; the Measurement of Time; Light; 
the Telescope and Spectroscope ; Apparent Places of the Heavenly 
Bodies ; the Real Distances and Dimensions ; Universal Gravitation. 
The most recent Astronomical Discoveries are incorporated. Mr. 
Lockyer s work supplements that of the Astronomer Royal. " The 
book is full, clear, sound, and worthy of attention, not only as a 
popular exposition, but as a scientific ' Index :■' — Athenaeum. 
"The most fascinating of elementary books on the Sciences." — 
Nonconformist. 



26 SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. 

Macmillan (Rev. Hugh). — For other Works by the same 
Author, see Theological Catalogue. 

HOLIDAYS ON HIGH LANDS ; or, Rambles and Incidents in 
search of Alpine Plants. Crown 8vo. cloth. 6s. 

The aim of this book is to impart a general idea of the origin, cha- 
racter, and distribution of those rare and beautiful Alpine plants- 
which occur on the British hills, and which are found almost every- 
where on the lofty mountain chains of Europe, Asia, Africa, and 
America. In the first three chapters the peculiar vegetation of the 
Highland mountains is fully described ; while in the remaining 
chapters this vegetation is traced to its northern cradle in the moun- 
tains of No? way, and to its southern Etiropean termination in the 
Alps of Switzerland. The information the author has to give is 
conveyed in a setting of personal adventure. "One of the most 
charming books of its kind ever written.'''' — Literary Churchman. 
"Mr. M.'s glowing pictures of Scandinavian scenery." — Saturday 
Review. 

FOOT-NOTES FROM THE PAGE OF NATURE. With 
numerous Illustrations. Fcap. 8vo. $s, 

" Those who have derived pleasure and profit from the study of flowers 
and ferns — subjects, it is pleasing to find, now everywhere popular 
— by descending lower into the arcana of the vegetable kingdom, 
will find a still more interesting and delightful field of research in 
the objects brought under review in the following pages." — Preface. 
' ' The naturalist and the botanist will delight in this volume, and 
those who understand little of the scientific parts of the work will 
linger over the mysterious page of nature here unfolded to their 
■view." — John Bull. 

Mansfield (C. B.)— A THEORY OF SALTS. A Treatise 
on the Constitution of Bipolar (two-membered) Chemical Com- 
pounds. By the late Charles Blachford- Mansfield. Crown 
8vo. 14s-. 

"Mansfield," says the editor, "wrote this book to defend the prin- 
ciple that the fact of voltaic decomposition afforded the true indi- 
cation, if properly interpreted, of the nature of the saline structure, 
and of the atomicity of the elements that built it up. No chemist 
will peruse this book without feeling that he is in the presence of an 



PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 27 



original thinker, whose pages are continually suggestive, even 
though their general argument may not be entirely concurrent in 
direction with that of modern chemical thought.'''' 

Mivart (St. George).— on THE GENESIS OF SPECIES. 
By St. George Mivart, F.R.S. Crown 8vo. Second Edition, 
to which notes have been added in reference and reply to Darwin's 
"Descent of Man." With numerous Illustrations, pp. xv. 296. 
gs. 

The aim of the author is to support the doctrine that the various 
species have been evolved by ordinary natural lazvs (for the most 
part unknown) controlled by the subordinate action of "natural 
selection," and at the same time to remind some that there is and 
can be absolutely nothing in physical science which forbids them to 
regard those natural laws as acting with the Divine concurrence, 
and in obedience to a creative fiat originally imposed on the primeval 
cosmos, " in the beginning," by its Creator, its Upholder, and its 
Lord. Nearly fifty zuoodcuts illustrate the letter-press, and a com- 
plete index makes all references extremely easy. Canon Kingsley, 
in his address to the " Devonshire Association," says, "Let me re- 
commend earnestly to you, as a specimen of what can be said on the 
other side, the ' Genesis of Species,' by Mr. St. George Mivart, 
jF.R.S., a book which I am happy to say has been received elsewhere 
as it has deserved, and, L trust, will be received so among you." 
"In no work in the English language has this great controversy 
been treated at once with the same broad and vigorous grasp 
of facts, and the same liberal and candid temper." — Saturday 
Review. 

Nature.— A WEEKLY ILLUSTRATED JOURNAL OF 
SCIENCE. Published every Thursday. Price 4^. Monthly 
Parts, is./^d. and is. Sd. ; Half-yearly Volumes, 10s. 6d. Cases for 
binding vols. Is. 6d. 

" Backed by many of the best names among English philosophers, and 
by a few equally valuable supporters in America and on the Conti- 
nent of Europe." — Saturday Review. " This able and well-edited 
Journal, which posts up the science of the day promptly, and 
promises to be of signal service to students and savants." — British 
Quarterly Review. 



28 SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. 

Oliver—Works by Daniel Oliver, F.R.S., F.L.S., Professor of 
Botany in University College, London, and Keeper of the Herba- 
rium and Library of the Royal Gardens, Kew : — 

LESSONS IN ELEMENTARY BOTANY. With nearly Two 
Hundred Illustrations. Twelfth Thousand. i8mo cloth. 4s. 6d. 

This book is designed to teach the elements of Botany on Professor 
Henslow 1 's plan of selected Types and by the use of Schedules. The 
earlier chapters, embracing the elements of Structural and Physio- 
logical Botany, introduce us to the methodical study of the Ordinal 
Types. The concluding chapters are entitled, " How to Dry 
Plants " and " How to Describe Plants. " A Valuable Glossary is 
appended to the volume. In the preparation of this work free use 
has been made of the manuscript materials of the late Professor 
Henslow. 

FIRST BOOK OF INDIAN BOTANY. With numerous 
Illustrations. Extra fcap. 8vo. 6s. 6d. 

This manual is, in substance, the author's " lessons in Elementary 
Botany," adapted for use in India. In preparing it he has had in 
view the want, often felt, of some handy resume of Indian Botany, 
vjhich might be serviceable not only to residents of India, but also to 
any one about to p'oceed thither, desirous of gettiitg some pre- 
liminary idea of the botany of the country. It contains a weK- 
digested summary of all essential knowledge pertaining to Indian 
Botany, wrought out hi accordance with the best principles of 
scientific arrangement." — Allen's Indian Mail. 

Penrose (F. C.)— ON A METHOD OF PREDICTING BY 
GRAPHICAL CONSTRUCTION, OCCULTATIONS OF 
STARS BY THE MOON, AND SOLAR ECLIPSES FOR 
ANY GIVEN PLACE. Together with more rigorous methods 
for the Accurate Calculation of Longitude. By F. C. Penrose, 
F.R.A.S. With Charts, Tables, etc. 4to. \zs. 

The author beliroes that if , by a graphic method, the prediction of 
occultations can be rendered more inviting, as well as more expedi- 
tious, than by the method of calculation, it may prove acceptable to 
the nautical profession as well as to scientific travellers or amateurs. 
The author has endeavoured to make the whole process as intelli- 
gible as possible, so that the beginner, instead of tnerely having to 



PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 29 

follow directions imperfectly understood, may readily comprehend 
the meaning of each step, and be able to illustrate the practice by the 
theory. Besides all necessary charts and tables, the work contains 
a large number of skeleton forms for working out cases in 
practice. 

Roscoe. — Works by Henry E. Roscoe, F.R.S., Professor of 
Chemistry in Owens College, Manchester : — 

LESSONS IN ELEMENTARY CHEMISTRY, INORGANIC 
AND ORGANIC. With numerous Illustrations and Chromo- 
litho of the Solar Spectrum, and of the Alkalies and Alkaline 
Earths. New Edition. Thirty-first Thousand. i8mo. cloth. 
4?. 6d. 

It has been the endeavour of the author to arrange the most important 
facts and principles of Modern Chemistry in a plain but concise 
and scientific form, suited to the present requirements of elementary 
instruction. For the purpose of facilitating the attainment of 
exactitude in the kncnvledge of the subject, a series of exercises and 
questions upon the lessons have been added. The metric system of 
weights and measures, and the centigrade thermometric scale, are 
used throughout this work. The new edition, besides neiu wood- 
cuts, contains many additions and improvements, and includes the 
most important of the latest discoveries. " We unhesitatingly pro- 
nounce it the best of all our elementary treatises on Chemistry"— 
Medical Times. 

SPECTRUM ANALYSIS. Six Lectures, with Appendices, En- 
gravings, Maps, and Chromolithographs. Royal 8vo. z\s. 

A Second Edition of these popular Lectures, containing all the most 
recent discoveries and several additional illustrations. "In six 
lectures he has given the history of the discovery and set forth the 
facts relating to the analysis of light in such a way that any reader 
of ordinary intelligence and information will be able to understand 
what '■Spectrum Analysis' is, and what are its claims to rank 
among the most signal triumphs of science." — Nonconformist. 
' ' The lectures themselves furnish a most admirable elementary 
treatise on the subject, whilst by the insertion in appendices to each 
lecture of extracts from the most important published memoirs, the 
author has rendered it equally valuable as a text-book for advanced 
students." — Westminster Review. 



3o SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. 

Stewart (B.)— LESSONS IN ELEMENTARY PHYSICS. 
By Balfour Stewart, F.R.S., Professor of Natural Philosophy 
in Owens College, Manchester. With numerous Illustrations and 
Chromolithos of the Spectra of the Sun, Stars, and Nebulae. Second 
Edition. i8mo. 4^. 6d. 

A description, in an elementary manner, of the most important of 
those laws which regulate the phenomena of nature. The active 
agents, heat flight, electricity, etc., are regarded as varieties of 
energy, and the work is so arranged that their relation to one 
another, looked at in this light, and the paramount importance of 
the lazvs of energy, are clearly brought out. The volume contains 
all the necessary illustrations. The Educational Times calls this 
"the beau-ideal of a scientific text-book, clear, accurate, and 
thorough." 

Thudichum and Dupre. — a TREATISE ON THE 
ORIGIN, NATURE, AND VARIETIES OF WINE. 
Being a Complete Manual of Viticulture and CEnology. By. J. L. 
W. Thudichum, M.D., and August Dupre, Ph.D., Lecturer 
on Chemistry at Westminster Hospital. Medium 8vo. cloth 
gilt. 25^. 

In this elaborate work the subject of the manufacture of wine is 
treated scientifically in minute detail, from every point of view. A 
chapter is devoted to the Origin and Physiology of Vines, two to the 
Principles of Viticulture ; while other chapters treat of Vintage and 
Vinificatiou, the Chemistry of Alcohol, the Acids, Ether, Sugars, 
and other matters occurring in wine. This introductory matter 
occupies the first nine chapters, the remaining seventeen chapters 
being occupied with a detailed account of the Viticulture and the 
Wines of the various countries of Europe, of the Atlantic Islands, 
of Asia, of Africa, of America, and of Australia. Besides a 
number of Analytical and Statistical Tables, the work is enriched 
with eighty-five illustrative woodcuts. ' 'A treatise almost unique 
for its usefulness either to the wine-grower, the vendor, or the con- 
sumer of wine. The analyses of wine are the most complete we 
have yet seen, exhibiting at a glance the constituent principles of 
nearly all the wines known in this country" — Wine Trade Review. 

Wallace (A. R.)— CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE THEORY 
OF NATURAL SELECTION. A Series of Essays. By 



PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 31 

Alfred Russel Wallace, Author of " The Malay Archipelago," 
etc. Second Edition, with Corrections and Additions. Crown 
8vo. §s.6d. (For other Works by the same Author, see CATA- 
LOGUE of History and Travels.) 

Mr. Wallace has good claims to be considered as an independent 
originator of the theory of natural selection. Dr. Hooker, in 
his address to the British Association, spoke thus of the author; 
* ' Of Mr. Wallace and his many contributions to philosophical 
biology it is not easy to speak -without enthusiasm; for, putting 
aside their great merits, he, throughoict his writings, with a 
modesty as rare as I believe it to be unconscious, forgets his own 
zinquestioned claim to the honour of having originated, indepeu~ 
dently of Mr. Darwin, the theories which he so ably defends." 
The Saturday Review says : "He has combined an abundance of 
fresh and original facts with a liveliness and sagacity of reasoning 
which are not often displayed so effectively on so small a scale." 
The Essays in this volume are : — /. "On the Law which has regu- 
lated the introduction of New Species." II. "On the Tendencies of 
Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Type." III. "Mi- 
micry, and other Protective Resemblances among Animals." IV. 
" The Malayan Papilionida;, as illustrative of the Theory of 
Natural Selection." V. "On Instinct in Man and Animals." 
VI. "The Philosophy of Birds' Nests." VII. "A Theory of 
Birds' Nests" VIII. " Creation by Law >." IX. " The Develop- 
ment of Human Races under the law of A r atural Selection." 
X. " The limits of Natural Selection as applied to Man." 

Warington.— THE WEEK OF CREATION; OR, THE 
COSMOGONY OF GENESIS CONSIDERED IN ITS 
RELATION TO MODERN SCIENCE. By George War- 
ington, Author of " The Historic Character of the Pentateuch 
Vindicated." Crown Svo. 45-. 6d. 

The greater part of this work it taken up with the teaching of the 
Cosmogony. Its purpose is also investigated, and a chapter is 
devoted to the consideration of the passage in which the difficulties 
occur. ' 'A very able vindication of the Mosaic Cosmogony, by a 
writer who unites the advantages of a critical knoivledge of the 
Hebrew text and of distinguished scientific attainments." — 
Spectator. 



32 SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. 

Wilson.— Works by the late George Wilson, M.D., F.R.S.E., 
Regius Professor of Technology in the University of Edinburgh ;— 

RELIGIO CHEMICI. With a Vignette beautifully engraved after 
a design by Sir Noel Paton. Crown 8vo. Ss. 6d. 

' ' George Wilson," says the Preface to this volume, ' 'had it in his heart 
for many years to write a book corresponding to the Religio Medici 
of Sir Thomas Browne, zvith the title Religio Chemici. Several 
of the Essays in this volume we>-e intended to form chapters of it. 
These fragments being in most cases like finished gems waiting to be 
set, some of them are now given in a collected form to his friends 
and the public. In living remembrance of his purpose, the name 
chosen by himself has been adopted, although the original design 
can be but very faintly represented." The Contents of the volume ■ 
are: — ■" Chemistry and Natural Theology." " The Chemistry of 
the Stars; an Argument touching the Stars and their Inhabitants." 
" Chemical Final Causes; as illustrated by the presence of Phos- 
phorus, Nitrogen, and Iron in the Higher Sentient Organisms." 
" Robert Boyle." " Wollaston." " Life and Discoveries of Dalton." 
" Thoughts on the Resurrection; an Address to Medical Students." 
"^4 more fascinating volume," the Spectator says, "has seldom 
fallen into our hands." The Freeman says: " These papers are all 
valuable and deeply interesting. The production of a profound 
thinker, a suggestive and eloquent writer, and a man whose piety 
and genius Went hand in hand." 

THE PROGRESS OF THE TELEGRAPH. Fcap. 8vo. is. 

" While a complete view of the progress of the greatest of human 
inventions is obtained, all its suggestions are brought out with a 
rare thoughtfulness, a genial humour, and an exceeding beauty of 
utterance." — Nonconformist. 

Winslow.— FORCE AND NATURE : ATTRACTION AND 
REPULSION. The Radical Principles of Energy graphically 
discussed in their Relations to Physical and Morphological De- 
velopment. By C. F. Winslow, M.D. 8vo. 145-. 

The author having for long investigated Nature in many directions, 
has ever felt tmsatisfied with the physical foundations upon which 
some branches of science have been so long compelled to rest. . The 
question, he believes, must have occurred to many astronomers and 



PHYSIOLOGY, AX ATOMY, ETC. 33 



physicists whether some subtle principle antagonistic to attraction 
docs not also exist as an all-pervading element in nature, and so 
operate as in some way to disturb the action of what is generally 
considered by the scientific world a unique force. The aim of the 
present work is to set forth this subject in its broadest aspects, and 
in such a manner as to invite thereto the attention of the learned. 
The subjects of the eleven chapters are : — /. "Space." II. "Mattery 
III. "Inertia, Force, and Mind." IV. "Molecules." V. 
" Molecular Force." VI. "Union and Inseparability of Matter 
and Force." VII. and VIII. " Nature and Action of Force — 
Attraction — Repulsion." IX. " Cosmical Repulsion. X. "Me- 
chanical Force." XI. "Central Forces and Celestial Physics." 
"Deserves thoughtful and conscientious study." — Saturday Review. 

Wurtz.— A HISTORY OF CHEMICAL THEORY, from the 
Age of Lavoisier down to the present time. By Ad. Wurtz. 
Translated by Henry Watts, F.R.S. Crown Svo. 6j. 

" The discourse, as a resume of chemical theory and research, unites 
singular luininousness and grasp. A few judicious notes are added 
by the translator." — Pall Mall Cazette. " The treatment of the 
subject is admirable, and the translator has evidently done his duly 
most efficiently." — Westminster Review. 



WORKS IN PHYSIOLOGY, ANATOMY, AND 
MEDICAL WORKS GENERALLY, 



Allbutt (T. C.)— ON THE USE OF THE OPHTHALMO- 
SCOPE in Diseases of the Nervous System and of the Kidneys ; 
also in certain other General Disorders. By Thomas Clifford 
Allbutt, M.A., M.D. Cantab., Physician to the Leeds General 
Infirmary, Lecturer on Practical Medicine, etc. etc. Svo. i^s. 

The Ophthalmoscope has been found of the highest value in the inves- 
tigation of nervous diseases. But it is not easy for physicians who 
have left the schools, and are engaged in practice, to take up a new 



34 SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. 

instrument -which requires much skill in using ; it is therefore 
hoped that by such the present volume, containing the results of the 
author 's extensive use of the instrument in diseases of the nervous 
system, will be found of high value ; and that to all students it may 
prove a usefoil hand-book. After four introductory chapters on the 
history and value of the Ophthalmoscope, and the manner of investi- 
gating the states of the optic nerve and retina, the author treats of 
the various diseases with which optic changes are associated, and 
describes the way in which such associations take place. Besides 
the cases referred to throughout the volume, the Appendix con- 
tains details 0/123 cases illustrative of the subjects discussed in the 
text, and a series of tabulated cases to show the Ophthalmoscopic 
appearances of the eye in Insanity, Mania, Dementia, Melancholia 
and Monomania, Idiotcy, and General Paralysis. The volume is 
illustrated with two valuable coloured plates of morbid appearances 
of the eye under the Ophthalmoscope. " By its aid men will no 
longer be compelled to work for years in the dark ; they will have a 
definite standpoint whence to proceed on their course of investigation." 
— Medical Times. 

Anstie (F. E.)— neuralgia, and diseases which 

RESEMBLE IT. By Francis E. Anstie, M.D., M.R.C.P., 

Senior Assistant Physician to Westminster Hospital. 8vo. 10s. 6d. 

Dr. Anstie is well known as one of the greatest living authorities on 
Neuralgia. The present treatise is the result of many years' careful 
independent scientific investigation into the nature and proper treat- 
ment of this most painful disease. The author has had abundant 
means of studying the subject both in his own person and in the 
hundreds of patients that have resorted to him for treatment. He 
has gone into the whole subject indicated in the title ab initio, and 
the publishers believe it will be found that he has p'esented it in an 
entirely original light, and done much to rob this excruciating and 
hitherto refractory disease of many of its terrors. The Introduction 
treats briefly of Pain in General, and contains some striking and 
even original ideas as to its nature and in reference to sensation 
generally. 

Barwell. — THE CAUSES AND TREATMENT OF LATERAL 
CURVATURE OF THE SPINE. Enlarged from Lectures 
published in the Lancet. By Richard Barwell, . F.R.C.S., 



PHYSIOLOGY, ANATOMY, ETC. 35 

Surgeon to and Lecturer on Anatomy at the Charing Cross Hospital. 
Second Edition. Crown Svo. 45-. 6d. 

Having failed to find in books a satisfactory theory of those conditions 
which produce lateral curvature, Mr. Harwell resolved to investi- 
gate the subject for himself ab initio. The present work is the 
result of long and patient study of Spines, normal and abnormal. 
He believes the views which lie has been led to form account for those 
essential characteristics which have hitherto been left unexplained ; 
and the treatment which he advocates is certainly less irksome, and 
will be found more efficacious than that which has hitherto been 
pursued. Indeed, the mode in which the first edition has been 
received by the profession is a. gratifying sign that Mr. Harwell's 
principles have made their value and their weight felt. Many 
pages and a number of woodcuts have been added to the Second 
Edition. 

Corfield (Professor W. H.) — a DIGEST OF FACTS 
RELATING TO THE TREATMENT AND UTILIZATION 
OF SEWAGE. By W. H. Corfield, M.A., B.A., Professor 
of Hygiene and Public Health at University College, London. 
Svo. 10s. 6d. Second Edition, corrected and enlarged. 

The author in the Second Edition has revised and corrected the entire 
work, and made many important additions. The headings of the 
eleven chapters are as follcnu: — /. "Early Systems: Midden-Heaps 
and Cesspools." II. "Filth and Disease — Cause and Effect." 
III. "Improved Midden-Pits and Cesspools ; Midden-Closets, Pail- 
Closets, etc. " IV. " The Dry- Closet Systems. V. ' ' If ater- Closets. ' ' 
VI. "Sewerage," VII. "Sanitary Aspects of 'the Water- Carrying 
System." VIII. " Value of Sei.ua ge; Injury to Pivers." IX. 
"Town Sewage; Attempts at Utilization." X. "Filtration and 
Irrigation." XI. "Influence of Sewage Farming on the Public 
Health." An abridged account of the more recently published 
researches on the subject zuill be J'ound in the Appendices, while 
the Summary contains a concise statement of the views which the 
author himself has been led to adopt: references liave been inserted 
throughout to shenv from what sources the numerous quotations have 
bee?i derived, and an Index has been added. "Mr. Corfield 's work 
is entitled to rank as a standard atitho7'ity, no less than a con- 
venient handbook, in all matters relating to sewage." — Athenaeum. 



36 SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. 

Elam (C.)— A PHYSICIAN'S PROBLEMS. By Charles 

ELAM, M.D., M.R.C.P. Grown 8vo. 9s. 

Contents -.^"Natural Heritage." " On Degeneration in Man." 
" On Moral and Criminal Epidemics." "Body v. Mind." "Il- 
lusions and Hallucinations." " On Somnambulism. "Reverie 
and Abstraction." These Essays are intended as a contribution to 
the Natural History of those outlying regions of Thought and 
Action whose domain is the debateable ground of Brain, Nerve, 
and Mind. They are designed also to indicate the origin and mode 
of perpetuation of those varieties of organizatioii, intelligence, and 
general tendencies towards vice or virtue, which seem to be so 
capriciously developed among mankind. They also point to causes 
for the infinitely varied forms of disorder of nerve and brain — 
organic and functional— far deeper and more recondite than those 
generally believed in. " The book is one which all statesmen, ■ 
magistrates, clerg)'tnen, medical mejt, and parents should study and 
inwardly digest." — Examiner. 

Fox. — Works by Wilson Fox, M.D. Lond., F.R.C.P., Holme 
■Professor of Clinical Medicine, University College, London, 
Physician Extraordinary to her Majesty the Queen, etc. : — 

ON THE DIAGNOSIS AND TREATMENT OF THE 
VARIETIES OF DYSPEPSIA, CONSIDERED IN RELA- 
TION TO THE PATHOLOGICAL ORIGIN OF THE 
DIFFERENT FORMS OF INDIGESTION. Second Edition. 
8vo. "js. 6d. 

ON THE ARTIFICIAL PRODUCTION OF TUBERCLE IN 
THE LOWER ANIMALS, With Coloured Plates. 4to. 5j. 6d. 
In this Lecture Dr. Fox describes in minute detail a large number of 
experiments made by him on guinea-pigs and rabbits for the pur- 
pose of inquiring into the origin of Ticbercle by the agency of direct 
b'7-itation or by septic mattejs. This method of inquiry he believes 
to be one of the most i7nportant advances which have been recently 
made in the pathology of the disease. The work is illustrated by 
three plates, each containing a number of carefully coloured illus- 
trations from nature. 
ON THE TREATMENT OF HYPERPYREXIA, as Illustrated 
in Acute Articular Rheumatism by means of the External Applica- 
tion of Cold. 8vo. is. 6d. 



PH i SJOLOGY, AAA TOM] ) ETC. 37 



The object of this work is to show that the class of cases included under 
the title, ami which have hitherto hem invariably fatal, may, by 
a judicious use of the cold bath and without venesection, 'be brmtght 
to a favourable termination. Minute details are given of the 
successful treatment by this method of two patients by the author, 
followed by a Commentary on the cases, in which the merits of the 
mode of treatment are discussed and compared with those of methods 
/allowed by other eminent practitioners. Appended are tables of the 
observations made on the temperature during- the treatment; a table 
showing (he effect of the immersion of the patients in the baths em- 
ployed, in order to exhibit the rate at -which the temperature was 
lowered zu each case; a table of the chief details of twen 
cases 0/ this class recently published, and which are referred to m 
various Jarts of the Commentary. Two Charts are also introduced, 
giving a connected view of the progress of the two successful cases, 
and a series of sphygvuographic tracings of the pulses of the two 
Pate" 1 *. "A clinical study of rare value. Should be read by 
«<?.' —-Medical Press and Circular. 

Galton (D.)_ AN ADDRESS ON THE GENERAL PRIN- 
CIPLES WHICH SHOULD BE OBSERVED IN THE 
CONSTRUCTION OF HOSPITALS. Delivered to the British 
Medical Association at Leeds, July 1S69. By Douglas Galton 
C. B. , F. R. S. Crown Svo. 3 s. 6d. 

In tills Address the author endeavours to enunciate what are those 
principles -which seem to him to form the starting-point from which 
all architects should proceed in the construction if hospitals. Be- 
sides Mr. Galton' s paper the book^contalns the opinion/ expressed in 
the subsequent discussion by several eminent medical men, such as 
Dr. Kennedy, Sir James Y. Simpson, Dr. Hughes Ben net, and 
others. The work is illustrated by a number of plans, sections, and 
other cuts. ' <A n admirable exposition of those conditions of struc- 
ture -which most conduce to cleanliness, economy, and convenience." 
— Times. 

Harley ( J.>— THE OLD VEGETABLE NEUROTICS, Hem- 
lock, Opium, Belladonna, and Henbane; their Physiological 
Action and Therapeutical Use, alone and in combination. Being 
the Gulstonian Lectures of 1S6S extended, and including a Complete 
Examination of the Active Constituents of Opium. By foiix 
Harley, M.D. LoncT./F.R.C.P., F.L.S., 6tc. '8voi 12s. 



38 SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. 

The authors object throughout the investigations and experiments on 
which this volume is founded has been to ascertain, clearly and 
definitely, the action of the drugs employed on the healthy body in 
medicinal doses, from the smallest to the largest ; to deduce simple 
practical conclusions from the facts observed ; and then to apply the 
drug to the relief of the particular' conditions to which its action 
appeared suited. Many experiments have been made by the author 
both on men and the lower animals ; and the author's endeavour 
has been to prresent to the mind, as far as words may do, impres- 
sions of the actual condition of the individual subjected to the 
drug. " Those who are interested generally in the progress of 
medical science will find much to repay a careful perusal. 1 ' — 
Athenaeum. 

Hood (Wharton). — ON BONE-SETTING (so called), and 
its Relation to the Treatment of Joints Crippled by Injury, Rheu- 
matism, Inflammation, etc. etc. By Wharton P. Hood, 
M.D., M.R.C.S. Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. 

Hie author for a period attended the London practice of the late Mr. 
Hutton, the famous and successful bone-setter, by whom he was 
initiated into the mystery of the art and practice. Thus the author 
is amply qualified to write on the subject from the practical point of 
view, while his professional education enables hiin to consider it in 
its scientific and surgical bearings. In the present work he gives a 
brief account of the salient features of a bone-setter 's method of pro- 
cedure in the treatment of damaged joints, of the results of that treat- 
ment, and of the class of cases in which he has seen it prove successful. 
The author's aim is to give the rationale of the bone-setter' s practice, 
to reduce it to something like a scientific method, to show when force 
should be resorted to and when it should not, and to initiate 
surgeons into the secret of Mr. Huttoris successful manipulation. 
Throughout the work a great number of authentic instances of 
successful treatment are given, with the details of the method of 
cure ; and the Chapters on Manipulations and Affections of the 
Spine are illustrated by a number of appropriate and well-executed 
cuts. " Dr. HoooT s book is full of instruction, and should be read 
by all surgeons." — Medical Times. 

Humphry.— THE HUMAN SKELETON (including the joints). 
By G. M. Humphry, M.D., F.R.S. With 260 Illustrations, 
drawn from nature. Medium 8vo. 28j. 



PHYSIOLOGY, ANATOMY, ETC. 39 

In lecturing on the Skeleton it has been the author 's practice, instead 
of giving a detailed account of the several parts, to request his 
students to get up the descriptive anatomy of certain bones, with the 
aid of some work on osteology. He afterwards tested their acquire- 
ments by examination, endeavouring to supply deficiencies and 
correct errors, adding also such information —physical, physiologi- 
cal, pathological, and practical — as he had gathered from his own 
observation and researches, and -which was likely to be useful and 
excite an interest in the subject. This additional information 
forms, in great part, the material of this volume, -which is intended 
to be supplementary to existing -works on anatomy. Considerable 
space has been devoted to the description of the joints, because it is 
less fully given in other -works, and because an accurate knowledge 
of the structure and peculiar form of the joints is essential to a 
correct knowledge of their movements. The numerous illustrations 
were all drawn jtpon stone from nature; and in most instances, 
from specimens prepared for the purpose by the author himself 
"Bearing at once the stamp of the accomplished scholar, and 
evidences of the skilful anatomist. We express our admiration of 
the drawings." — Medical Times and Gazette. 

Huxley's Physiology.— See P . 24, preceding. 

Journal of Anatomy and Physiology. 

Conducted, by Professors Humphry and Newton, and Mr. Clark 
of Cambridge, Professor Turner of Edinburgh, and Dr. 
Wright of Dublin. Published twice a year. Old Series, Parts 
I. and II., price Js. 6d. each. Vol. I. containing Parts I. and II., 
Royal Svo., i6.s\ New Series, Parts I._to IX. 6.?. each, or yearly 
Vols. 12s. 6d. each. 

Lankester.— COMPARATIVE LONGEVITY IN MAN AND 
THE LOWER ANIMALS. By E. Ray Lankester, B.A. 
Crown Svo. 4s. 6d. 

This Essay gained the prize offered by the University of Oxford for 
the best Paper on the subject of which it treats. This interesting 
subject is here treated in a thorough manner, both scientifically and 
statistically. 

Maclaren.— TRAINING, IN THEORY AND PRACTICE. 
By Archibald Maclaren, the Gymnasium, Oxford. Svo. 
Handsomely bound in cloth, Is. 6d. 



40 SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. 

The ordinary agents of health are Exercise, Diet, Sleep, Air, Bath- 
ing, and Clothing. In this work the author examines each of 
these agents in detail, and from two different points of view. First, 
as to the manner in %vhich it is, or should be, administered under 
ordinary circumstances : and secondly, in what manner and to 
what extent this mode of administration is, or should be, altered for 
purposes of training ; the object of "training," according to the 
author, being ' ' to put the body, with extreme and exceptional care, 
under the influence of all the agents which promote its health and 
strength, in order to enable it to meet extreme and exceptional de- 
mands upon its energies." Appended are various diagrams and 
tables relating to boat-racing, and tables connected zuith diet and 
training. " The philosophy of human health has seldom received 
so apt an exposition."— Globe. " After all the nonsense that has 
been written about training, it is a comfort to get hold of a 
thoroughly sensible book at last." — John Bull. 

Macpherson,— Works by John Macpherson, M.D. :— 

THE BATHS AND WELLS OF EUROPE; Their Action and 
Uses. With Hints on Change of Air and Diet Cures. With a 
Map. Extra fcap. 8vo. 6s. 6d. 

This work is intended to supply information which will afford aid in 
the selection of such Spas as are suited for particular cases. It 
exhibits a sketch of the present condition of our knotvledge on the 
subject of the operation of mineral waters, gathered from the 
author's personal observation, and from every other available 
source of information. It is divided into four books, and each 
book into several chapters : — Book I. Elements of Treatment, in 
which, among other matters, the external and internal uses oj 'water- 
are treated of . II. Bathing, treating of the. various kinds of baths. 

III . Wells, treating of the various kinds of mineral waters. 

IV. Diet Cures, in which various vegetable, milk, and other 
" cures " are discussed. Appended is an Index of Diseases noticed, 
and one of places named. Prefixed is a sketch map of the principal 
baths and places of health-resort in Europe. "Dr. Macpherson 
has given the kind of information which eve7-y medical practitioner 
ought to possess." — The Lancet. " WJioever wants to know the 
real character of any health-resort must read Dr. Macpherson" 's 
book." — Medical Times. 



PHYSIOLOGY, AX ATOMY, ETC, 41 

Macpherson (J.) -continued. 

OUR BATHS AND V\ ELLS : The Mineral Waters of the 

Islands, with a List of Sea-bathing Places. Extra fcap. Svo. 
pp. xv. 205. 3.C 6;/. 

Dr. Macpherson has divided his ; parts. He is 

a few introductory observations on bath life, its circumstances, 
and pleasures ; lie then explains in detail the composition of the 
various mineral waters, and points out the special curative pro- 
perties of each class. A chapter on "The J history of British 
Wells" from the earliest period to th, e for?ns the 

natural transition to the second part of this voh . ; eats of 

the different kinds of mineral waters in England, whether pure, 
thermal and earthy, saline, chalybeate, or sulphur. Wales, Scot- 
laud, and Ireland .aterials for distinct sections, .in 
Index of mineral waters, one of sea-bathing places, and a third of 
wells of pure or nearly pure water, terminate the book. "This little 
volume forms a very available handbook for a large class of 
invalids.'" — Nonconformist. 

Maudsley.— Works by Henry Maudsley, M.D., Professor of 
Medical Jurisprudence in University College, London : — 

BODY AND MIND : An Inquiry into their Connection and 
Mutual Influence, specially in reference to Mental Disorders ; being 
the Gulstonian Lectures for 1870. Delivered before the Royal 
College of Physici ins. ' T-nvn Svo. $s. 

The volume consists of three Leetuns an lees, the 

general plan of the whole being to bring Man, both it, 
and mental relations, as much as possible under the scope 0/' scientific 
inquiry. The first Lecture is devoted to a . f the physical 

conditions of mental function in health. In the second Lecture are 
sketchied the features* of some fo?-ms of degeneracy ■ hibited 

in morbid varieties of the human kind, with the purpose of bringing 
prominently into notice the operation of physical causes prom 
generation to generation, and the relations/tip of mental to other 
diseases of the nervous system. In the third Lecture are displayed 
the relations of morbid states of the body and disordered mental 
function. Appendix I. is a criticism of the Archbishop of York's 
ess on " The /Limits of Philosophical Inquiry." J pp. na'ix LI. 
■ with the "Theory of Vitality," in which the author en- 



42 SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. 

Maudsley (H.)— continued. 

deavours to set forth the reflections which facts seem to warrant. 
"■It distinctly marks a step in the progress of scientific psychology :" 
— The Practitioner. 

THE PHYSIOLOGY AND PATHOLOGY OF MIND. 
Second Edition, Revised. 8vo. 16s. 

This work is the result of an endeavour on the author 's part to arrive 
at some definite conviction with regard to the physical conditions of 
mental function, and the relation^ of the phenomena of sound and 
unsound mind. The author's aim throughout has been twofold : 
I. To treat of mental phenomena from a physiological rather than 

from a metaphysical point of view. II. To bring the manifold 
instructive instances presented by the unsound mind to bear upon 
the interpretation of the obscure problems of mental science. In the 

first part, the author pursues his independent inquiry into the 
science of Mind in the same direction as that followed by Bain, 
Spencer, Laycock, and' Carpenter ; and in the second, he studies 
the subject in a light which, in this country at least, is almost 
entirely novel. "Dr. Maudsley' 's work, which has already become 
standard, we most urgently recommend to the careful study of 
all those who are interested in the physiology and pathology of the 
brain. " — Anthropological Review. 

Practitioner (The). — A Monthly Journal of Therapeutics. 
Edited by Francis E. Anstie, M. D. 8vo. Price u. 6d. 
Vols. I to VII. 8vo. cloth. lev. 6d. each. 

Radcliffe.— DYNAMICS OF NERVE AND MUSCLE. By 
Charles Bland Radcliffe, M.D., F.R.C.P., Physician to the 
Westminster Hospital, and to the National Hospital for the 
Paralysed and Epileptic. Crown 8vo. 8s. 6d. 

This work contains the result of the author's long investigations into the 
Dynamics of 'Nerve and Muscle, as connected with Animal Electricity : 
The author endeavours to show from these researches that the state 
of action in nerve and muscle, instead of being a manifestation of 
vitality, must be brought under the domain of physical law in order 
to be intelligible, and that a different meaning, also based upon pure 
physics, must be. attached to the state of rest. " The practitioner 



PHYSIOLOGY, ANATOMY, ETC. 



will find in Dr. Radcliffe a 'guide, philosopher, and friend,' from 
whose teaching he cannot Jail to reap a plentiful harvest of new and 
valuable ideas." — Scotsman. 

Reynolds.— A SYSTEM OF MEDICINE. Vol. I. Edited 
by J. Russell Reynolds, M.D., F.R.C.P. London. Second 
Edition. Svo. 2$s. 

Part I. General Diseases, or Affections of the Whole System. 
§ /. — Those determined by agents operating from without, such as 
the exanthemata, malarial diseases, and their allies. § II. — Those 
determined by conditions existing within the body, such as Jon/, 
Rheumatism, Rickets, etc. Part II. Local Diseases, or affections 
of particular Systems. § I. — Diseases of the Skin. 

A SYSTEM OF MEDICINE. Vol. II. Second Edition in the 
Press. Svo. 255. 

Part II. Local Diseases (continued). § I.— Diseases of the Nervous 
System. A. General Nervous Diseases. B. Partial Diseases of 
the Nervous System. 1. Diseases of the Head. 2. Diseases of the 
Spinal Column. 3. Diseases of the A T erzvs. § II. — Diseases of 
the Digestive System. A. Diseases of the Stomach. 

A SYSTEM OF MEDICINE. Vol. III. 8vo. 25* 

Part IT. Local Diseases (continued). § II. Diseases of the Digestirr 
System (continued). B. Diseases of the Mouth. C. Diseases of 
the Fauces, Pharynx, and (Esophagus. D. Diseases of the In- 
testines. E. Diseases of the Peritoneum. F. Diseases of the 
Liver. G. Diseases of the Pancreas. § III. — Diseases of the 
Respiratory System. A. Diseases of the Larynx. B. Diseases of 
the Thoracic Organs. " One of the best and most co?nprehensive 
treatises on Medicine which have yet been attempted in any country." 
— Indian Medical Journal. "Contains some of the best essays 
that have lately appeared, and is a complete library in itself." — 
Medical Press. 

Seaton.— A HANDBOOK OF VACCINATION. By Edward 
C. Seaton, M.D., Medical Inspector to the Privy Council. Extra 
fcap. 8vo. 8.?. 6d. 

The autlwrs object in putting forth this work is twofold : First, to 
provide a text-book On the science and practice of Vaccination for 



44 SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. 



the use of younger practitioners and of medical students ; secondly, 
to give what assistance he could to those engaged in the administra- 
tion of the system of Public Vaccination established in England. 
For many years past, from the nature of his office, Dr. Seaton has 
had constant intercourse in reference to the subject of Vaccination, 
■with medical men who are interested in it, and especially with that 
large part of the profession who are engaged as Public Vacci- 
nators. All the varieties of pocks, both in men and the lower 
animals, aretreated- of in detail, and much valuable information 
given 011 all points connected with lymph, and minute instructions 
as to the niceties and cautions which so greatly influence success 
in Vaccination. The administrative sections of the work will be 
of interest and value, not only to medical practitioners, but to 
many others to whom a right understanding of the principles on 
which a system of Public Vaccination should be based is indis- 
pensable. "Henceforth the indispensable handbook of Public Vacci- 
nation, and the standard authority on this great subject." — British 
Medical Journal. 

Symonds (J. A., M.D.}— MISCELLANIES. By John 
Addington Symonds, M.D. Selected and Edited, with an 
Introductory Memoir, by his Son. 8vo. Js. 6d. 

The late Dr. Symonds of Bristol was a man of a singularly versatile 
and elegant as well as powerful and scientific intellect. In order 
to make this selection from his many works generally interesting, 
the editor has confined himself to works of pure literature, and to 
such scientific studies as had a general philosophical or social 
interest. Among the general subjects are articles on " 'the Principles 
of Beauty," on "Knowledge" and a " Life of Dr. Pric/iard;" 
among the Scientific Studies are papers on " Sleep and Dreams," 
"Apparitions," "the Relations between Mind and Muscle," 
"Habit," etc.; there are several papers on "the Social and 
Political Aspects of Medicine ; " and a few Poems and. Transla- 
tions selected from a great number of equal merit. "A collection of 
graceful essays on general and scientific subjects, by a very accom- 
plished physician." — Gi-aphic. 



WORKS ON MENTAL AND MORAL 
PHILOSOPHY, AND ALLIED SUBJECTS. 

Aristotle.— AN INTRODUCTION TO ARISTOTLE'S 
RHETORIC. With Analysis, Notes, and Appendices. By E. 
M. Cope, Trinity College, Cambridge. 8vo. 14.S. 

This work is introductory to an edition of the Greek Text of Aristotle's 
Rhetoric, which is in course of preparation. Its object is to render 
that treatise thorougJily intelligible. The author has aimed to 
illustrate, as preparatory to the detailed explanation of the work, the 
general bearings and relations of the Art of Rhetoric in itself, as 
well as the special mode of treating it adopted by Aristotle in his 
peculiar system. The evidence upon obscure or doubtful questions 
connected with the subject is examined ; and the relations which 
Rhetoric bears, in Aristotle's view, to the kindred art of Logic are 
fully considered. A connected Analysis of the work is given, and 
a few important matters are separately discussed in Appendices. 
There is added, as a general Appendix, by way of specimen of the 
antagonistic system of Isocrates and others, a complete analysis oj 
the treatise called "?i)Topixh irpos 'A\^ai/Spou, with a discussion oj 
its authorship and of the probable results of its teaching. 

ARISTOTLE ON FALLACIES ; OR, THE SOPHISTICI 
ELENCHI. With a Translation and Notes by Edward Poste, 
MA., Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. Svo. 8s. 6d. 

Besides the doctrine of Fallacies, Aristotle offers, either in this treatise 
or in other passages quoted in the Commentary, various glances 
over the world of science and opinion, various suggestions or pro- 
blems which are still agitated, and a vivid picture of the ancient 
system of dialectics, which it is hoped may be found both Interesting 



46 SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. 

and instructive. "It will be an assistance to genuine students of 
Aristotle.' 1 '' — Guardian. "It is indeed a work of great skill." — ■ 
Saturday Review. 

Butler (W. A.), Late Professor of Moral Philosophy in the 
University of Dublin : — 

LECTURES ON THE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILO- 
SOPHY. Edited from the Author's MSS., with Notes, by 
William Hepworth Thompson, M.A., Master of Trinity 
College, and Regius Professor of Greek in the University of 
Cambridge. Two Volumes. 8vo. il. $s. 

These Lectures consist of an Introductory Series on the Science of Mind 
generally, and five other Series on Ancient Philosophy, the greater 
part of which treat of Plato and the Platonists, the Fifth Series 
■being an unfinished course on the Psychology of Aristotle, contain- 
ing an able Analysis of the well known though by no means well 
unda-stood Treatise, irepl ipvxys. These Lectures are the result of 
patient and conscientious examination of the original documents, 
and may be considered as a perfectly independent contribution to our 
knowledge of the great master of Grecian wisdom. The author's 
intimate familiarity with the metaphysical writings of the last 
century, and especially with the English and Scotch School of 
Psychologists, has enabled him to illustrate the subtle speculations 
of which he treats in a manner calculated to render them more 
intelligible to the English mind than they can be by writers -trained 
solely in the technicalities of modern German schools. The editor 
has verified all the references, and added valuable Notes, in which 
he points out sources of more complete information. The Lectures 
constitute a History of the Platonic Philosophy — its seed-time, 
maturity, and decay. 

SERMONS AND LETTERS ON ROMANISM.— See Theo- 
logical Catalogue. 

Calderwood.— PHILOSOPHY OF THE INFINITE: A 
Treatise on Man's Knowledge of the Infinite Being, in answer to 
Sir W. Hamilton and Dr. Mansel. By the Rev. Henry 
Calderwood, M.A., LL.D., Professor of Moral Philosophy in 
the University of Edinburgh. Cheaper Edition. 8vo. 75. 6d. 



MENTA L A ND M ORA L PHIL OSOPH 1 ', £ TC. 47 

The purpose of this volume is, by a careful analysis of consciousness, 

to prove, in opposition to Sir W. Hamilton and Mr. Mansel, that 
man possesses a notion of an Infinite Being, and to ascertain the 
peculiar nature of the conception and the particular relations in 
•which it is found to arise. The province of Faith as related to that 
of Knowledge, and the characteristics of Knowledge and Thought 
as bearing on this subject, are examined ; and separate chapters are 
devoted to the consideration of our knowledge of the Infinite as 
First Cause, as Moral Governor, and as the Object of Worship. 
"A book of great ability .... written in a clear style, and may 
be easily understood by even those who are not versed in such 
discussions." — British Quarterly Review. 

Elam.— A PHYSICIAN'S PROBLEMS. —See Medical 
Catalogue, preceding. 

Galton (Francis).— HEREDITARY GENIUS : An Inquiry 
into its Laws and Consequences. See Physical Science 
Catalogue, preceding. 

Green (J. H.)— SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY: Founded on 
the Teaching of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge. By the 
late Joseph Henry Green, F.R.S., D.C.L. Edited, with a 
Memoir of the Author's Life, by John Simon, F.R.S., Medical 
Officer of Her Majesty's Privy Council, and Surgeon to St. 
Thomas's Hospital. Two Vols. Svo. 25J. 

The late Mr. Green, the eminent surgeon, was for many years the 
intimate friend and disciple of Coleridge, and an ardent student of 
philosophy. The language of Coleridge's will imposed on Mr. 
Green the obligation of devoting, so far as necessary, the remainder 
of his life to the one task of systematising, developing, and establish- 
ing the doctrines of the Coleridgian philosophy. With the assist- 
ance of Coleridge's manuscripts, but especially from the knowledge 
he possessed of Coleridge's doctrines, a nd independent study of at least 
the basal principles and metaphysics of the sciences and of all the 
phenomena of human life, he proceeded logically to work out a 
system of universal philosophy such as he deemed would in the main 
accord with- his master's aspirations. After many years of pre- 
paratory labour he resolved to complete in a compendious form a 
work which should give in system the doctrines most distinctly 
Coleridgian. The result is these two volumes. The first volume 



4" SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. 

is devoted to the general principles of philosophy ; the second aims at 
vindicating a priori (on principles for which the first volume has 
contended) the essential doctrines df Christianity. The zvork is 
divided into four parts: I. "On the Intellectual Faculties and 
processes which are concerned in the Investigation of Truth." 
II "Of First Principles in Philosophy:'' III. " Truths of 
Religion." IV. " The Idea of Christianity in relation to Con- 
troversial Philosophy. " 

Huxley (Professor.) — lay SERMONS, ADDRESSES, 
AND REVIEWS. See Physical Science Catalogue, 
preceding. 

JeVOnS. — Works by W. Stanley Jevons, M.A., Professor of 
Logic in Owens College, Manchester : — 

THE SUBSTITUTION OF SIMILARS, the True Principle of 
Reasoning. Derived from a Modification of Aristotle's Dictum. 
Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d. 

" All acts of reasoning" the author says, "seem to me to be dif- 
ferent cases of one uniform process, which may perhaps be best 
described as the substitution of similars. This phrase clearly 
expresses that familiar mode in which we continually argue by 
analogy from like to like, and take one thing as a representative 
of another. The chief difficulty consists in showing that all the 
forms of the old logic, as well as the fomdamental rules of mathe- 
matical reasoning, may be explained upon the sai?ie principle ; and 
it is to this difficult task I have devoted the most attention. Should 
my notion be true, a vast mass of technicalities may be swept from 
our logical text-books and yet the small remaining part of logical 
doctrine will prove far more ziseful than all the learning of the 
Schoolmen:'' Prefixed is apian of a nezv reasoning machine, the 
Logical Abacus, the construction and working of which is fully 
explained in the text and Appendix. "Mr. fevons' book is very 
clear and intelligible, and quite worth consulting." — Guardian. 

ELEMENTARY LESSONS IN LOGIC.-See Educational 
Catalogue. 

Maccoll. — THE GREEK SCEPTICS, from Pyrrho to Sextiis. 
An Essay which obtained the Hare Prize in the year 1868. By 



MENTAL AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY, ETC. 49 



NORMAN Maccoll, B.A., Scholar of Downing College, Cam- 
bridge. Crown Svo, y. 6d. 

This Essay consists of five parts: I. '■'Introduction.''' II. "Pyrrho 
and Timon" III. "The New Academy." IV. "The Later 
Sceptics." V. " The Pyrrhoueaus and New Academy con- 
trasted." — "Mr. Maccoll has produced a monograph which malts 
the gratitude of all students of p/ulosophy. His style is clear and 
vigorous; he has mastered the authorities, and criticises them in a 
modest but independent spirit." — Pall Mall Gazette. 

M'Cosh — Works by James M'Cosh, LL.D., President of Princeton 
College, New Jersey, U.S. 

' ' lie certainly shows himself skilful in that application of logic to 
psychology, in that inductive science of the human mind which is 
the fine side of English philosophy. His philosophy as a whole is 
worthy of attention." — Revue de Deux Mondes. 

THE METHOD OF THE DIVINE GOVERNMENT, Physical 
and Moral. Tenth Edition. Svo. 10s. 6d. 

This work is divided into four books. The first presents a general 
view of the Divine Government as fitted to throw light- -on the 
character of God; the second deals with the method of the Divine 
Government in the physical world; the third treats of the principles 
of the human mind through which God governs mankind; and the 
fourth is on Pastoral and Revealed Religion, and the Restoration 
of Man. An Appendix, consisting of seven articles, investigates 
the fundamental principles which underlie the speculations of the 
treatise. " This work is distinguished from other similar ones by 
its being based npon a thorough study of physical science, and an 
accurate knowledge of its present condition, a?td by its entering in a 
deeper and more unfettered manner than its predecessors upon the dis- 
cussion of the app'op-iate psychological, ethical, and theological ques- 
tions. The author keeps aloof at once from the a priori idealism and 
dreaminess of German speculation since Schelling, and from the 
onesideduess and narrowness of the empiricism and ptsitivism 
which have so prevailed in England." — Dr. Uh'ici, in "Zeitschrift 
fur Philosophic" 

THE INTUITIONS OF THE MIND. A New Edition. Svo. 
eloth. \os. Gd. 

D 



So SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. 

M^Cosh (J.)— continued. 

The object of this treatise is to determine the true nature of Intuition, 
and to investigate its laws. It starts with a general view of 
intuitive convictions, their character and the method in which they 
are employed, and passes on to a more detailed examination of 
them, treating them under the various heads of "Primitive Cogni- 
tions" " Primitive Beliefs," " Primitive Judgments" and " Moral 
Convictions." Their relations to the various sciences, mental and- 
physical, are then examined. Collateral criticisms are thrown 
into preliminary and supplementary chapters and sections. ' ' The 
unde?-taking to adjust the claims of the sensational and intuitional 
philosophies, and of the a posteriori and a. priori methods, is 
accomplished in this work with a great amount of success." — 
Westminster Review. "I value it for its large acquaintance 
with English Philosophy, zvhich has not led him to neglect the 
great German works. I admire the moderation and clearness, as 
well as comprehensiveness, of the author's views" — Dr. Dorner, of 
Berlin. 

AN EXAMINATION OF MR. J, S. MILL'S PHILOSOPHY: 
Being a Defence of Fundamental Truth. Crown 8vo. Js. 6d. 
This volume is not put forth by its author as a special reply to Mr. 
Mill's "Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy." 
In that work Mr. Mill has furnished the means of thoroughly 
estimating his theory of mind, of which he had only given hints 
and glimpses in his logical treatise. It is this theory which Dr. 
M'Cosh professes to examine in this volume; his aim is simply to 
defend a portion of primary truth which has been assailed by an 
acute thinker who has extensive influence in England. "In 
such points as Mr. Mill's notions of intuitions and necessity, he 
will have the voice of mankind with him."— Athenaeum. "Such 
a work greatly needed to be done, and the author was the man to 
do it. This volume is i?nportant, not merely in reference to the 
views of Mr. Mill, but of the whole school of writers, past and 
present, British and Continental, he so ably represents." — Princeton 
Review. 

THE LAWS OF DISCURSIVE THOUGHT : Being a Text- 
book of Formal Logic. Crown 8vo. $s. 

The main feature of this logical Treatise is to be found in the more 
thorough investigation of the nature of the notion, in regard to 



MENTAL AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY, ETC. 5 1 

M'Cosh (J.)— continued. 

-which the views of the school of Locke and Whatcly are regarded 
by the author as very defective, and the views of the school of Kant 
and Hamilton altogether erroneous. The author believes thai 
errors spring far more frequently from obscure, inadequate, indis- 
tinct, and confused Notions, and from not placing the Notions in 
their proper relation in judgment, than from Ratiocination. In 
this treatise, therefore, the Notion (with the term, and the Relation 
of Thought to Language) will be found to occupy a- larger relative 
place than in any logical work written since the time of the famous 
Art of Thinking. "The amount of summarized information 
which it contains is very great; and it is the only work on the very 
important subject with which it deals. Never was such a -work 
so much needed as in the present day." — London Quarterly 
Review. 

CHRISTIANITY AND POSITIVISM : A Series of Lectures to 
the Times on Natural Theology and Apologetics. Crown 8vo. 
>js. 6d. 

These Lectures were delivered in New York, by appointment, in the 
beginning of 1871, as the second course on the foundation of 
the Union Theological Seminary. There are ten Lectures in all, 
divided into three series : — /. "Christianity and Physical Science" 
(three lectures). II "Christianity and Mental Science" (four 
lectures). III. " Christianity and Historical Investigation" (three 
lectures). The Appendix contains articles on "Gaps in the Theory 
of Development ;" "Darwin's Descent of Man." "Principles 
of Herbert Spencer's Rhilosophy." In the course of the Lectures 
Dr. M'Cosh discusses all the most impoi-tant scientific problems 
which are supposed to affect Christianity. 

Masson. — RECENT BRITISH PHILOSOPHY : A Review, 
with Criticisms ; including some Comments on Mr. Mill's Answer 
to Sir William Hamilton. By David Masson, M.A., Professor 
of Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of Edinburgh. 
Crown 8vo. 6s. 

The author, in his usual graphic and forcible man tier, reviews in 
considerable detail, and points out the drifts of the philosophical 
speculations of the previous thirty years, bringing under notice the 
-work of all the principal philosophers 7C>l>o have been at work during 



5-2; SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. 

MasSOn (D .)— continued. 

that period on the highest problems which concern humanity: The 
four chapters are thus titled: — 7". "A Survey of Thirty Years." 
II. ' ' The Traditional Differences : how repeated in Carlyle, 
Hamilton, and Mill." III. "Effects of Recent Scientific Con- 
ceptions on Philosophy.''' 1 IV. "Latest Drifts and Groupings.'" 
The last seventy -six pages are devoted to a Review of Mr. Mill's 
criticism of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy. " We can 
nowhere point te a work which gives so clear an exposition of 
the course of philosophical speculation in Britain, during the past 
century, or which indicates so instructively the mutual influences of 
philosophic and scientific thought." — Fortnightly Review. 

BRITISH NOVELISTS.— See Belles Lettres Catalogue. 

LIFE OF MILTON.— See Biographical Catalogue. 

Maudsley. — Works by Henry Maudsley, M.D., Professor of 
Medical Jurisprudence in University College, London : — 

BODY AND MIND : An Inquiry into their Connection and 
Mutual Influence, specially in reference to Mental Diseases. See 
Medical Catalogue, preceding. 

THE PHYSIOLOGY AND PATHOLOGY OF MIND. 
See Medical Catalogue, preceding. 

Maurice. — Works by the Rev. Frederick Denison Maurice, 
M.A., Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Cam- 
bridge. (For other Works by the same Author, see Theological 
Catalogue.) 

SOCIAL MORALITY. Twenty-one Lectures delivered in the 
University of Cambridge. 8vo. 14s-. 

In this series of Lectures, Professor Maurice considers, historically 
and critically, Social Morality in its three main aspects : I. " The 
Relations which spring from the Family — Domestic Morality. " 
II. ' ' The Relations which subsist among the various constituents 
of a Nation — National Morality.'" III. "As it concerns Uni- 
versal Humanity — Universal Morality." Appended to each series 
., is a chapter on " Worship : " first, "Family Worship;" second, 



MENT. XL AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY, ETC. 5-3 



Maurice (F. D .) — continued. 

" National Worship ;" third, "Universal Worship." " Whilst 
reading it -we are charmed by the freedom from exclusiveness and 
prejudice, the large charity, the loftiness of thought, the eagerness to 
recognize and appreciate -wtta'cver there is of real worth extant in 
the -world, which animates it from one end to the other. We gain 
new thoughts and new ways of 'virwing things, even more, perhaps, 
from being brought for a time under the influence of so noble and 
spiritual a mind." — Athenaeum. 

THE CONSCIENCE : Lectures on Casuistry, delivered in the 
University of Cambridge. New and Cheaper Edition. Crown Svo. 
5* 

In this series of nine Lectures, Professor Maurice, with his wonted 
force and breadth and freshness, endeavours to settle what is meant 
by the word " Conscience," and discusses the most important 
questions immediately connected with the subject. Taking " Casu- 
istry " in its old sense as being the '■'■study of cases of Conscience," 
he endeavours to show in what way it may be brought to bear at 
the present day upon the acts and thoughts of our ordinary 
existence. He shores that Conscience asks for laws, not rules ; 
for freedom, not chains ; for education, not suppression, die 
has abstained from the use of philosophical terms, and has touched 
on philosophical systems only -when he fancied "they -were inter- 
fering -with the rights and duties of -wayfarers." The Saturday 
Review says: "We rise from them -with detestation of all that is 
selfish and mean, and with a living impression that there is such a 
thing as goodness after ail." 

MORAL AND METAPHYSICAL PHILOSOPHY. New 
Edition and Preface. Vol. I. Ancient Philosophy and the First to 
the Thirteenth Centuries ; Vol. II. the Fourteenth Century and the 
French Revolution, with a glimpse into the Nineteenth Century. 
2 "Vols. Svo. 2$s. 

This is an Edition in t-wo volumes of Professor Maurice's History of 
Philosophy from the earliest period to the present time. It was 
formerly scattered throughout a number of separate volumes, and it 
is believed that all admirers of the author and all students of 
philosophy will welcome this compact Edition. The subject is One 
o-f the highest importance, and it is treated here with fulness and 



54 SCIENTIFIC CATALOGUE. 



candour, and in a clean and interesting manner. In a long intro- 
duction to this Edition, in the form of a dialogue, Professor Maurice 
justifies some of his own peculiar views, and touches upon some of 
the most important topics of the time. 

Murphy.— HABIT AND INTELLIGENCE, in Connection 
with the Laws of Matter and Force : A Series of Scientific Essays. 
By Joseph John Murphy. Two Vols. 8vo. i6j. 

The author 's chief purpose in this work has been to state and to dis- 
cuss what he regards as the special and characteristic principles of 
life. The most important part of the work treats of those vital 
principles which belong to the inner domain of life itself, as dis- 
tinguished from the principles which belong to the border-land 
where life comes into contact with inorganic matter and force. lit 
the inner domain of life we find two principles, which are, the 
author believes, coextensive with life and peculiar to it : these are 
Habit and Intelligence. lie has made as full a statement as 
possible of the laws under which habits form, disappear, alter under 
altered circumstances, and vary spontaneously. He discusses that 
most important of all questions, whether intelligence is an ultimate 
fact, incapable of being resolved into any other, or only a resultant 
from the laws of habit. The latter part of the first volume is 
occupied with the discussion of the question of the Origin of Species. 
The first part of the second volume is occupied with an inquiry 
into the process of mental growth and development, and the nature 
of mental intelligence. In the chapter that follows, the author dis- 
cusses the science of history, and the three concluding chapters 
contain some ideas on the classification, the history, and the logic, of 
the sciences. The author's aim has been to make the subjects treated 
of intelligible to any ordinary intelligent man. " We are pleased 
to listen," says the Saturday Review-, "to a writer who has so firm 
a foothold ttpon the ground within the scope of his immediate 
survey, and who can enunciate with so much clearness and force 
propositions which come within his grasp." 

Thring (E., M. A.)— THOUGHTS ON LIFE-SCIENCE. 
By Edward Thring, M.A. (Benjamin Place), Head Master ©f 
Uppingham School. New Edition, enlarged and revised. 
Crown 8vo. Js. 6d. 

In this volume are discussed in a familiar manner some of the most 
interesting problems between Science and Religion, Reason and 



MENTAL AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY, ETC. 55 

Feeling. " Learning and Science," says the author, "are claiming 
the right of building up and pulling down a'crything, especially 
the latter. It has seemed to me no useless task to look steadily at 
zvhat has happened, to take stock as it were of men's gains, and to 
endeavour amidst new circumstances to arrive at some rational 
estimate of the bearings of things, so that the limits of what is 
possible at all events may be clearly marked out for ordinary 

readers This book is an endeavour to bring out some of the 

main facts of the world." 

Venn. — THE LOGIC OF CHANCE: An Essay on the Founda- 
tions and Province of the Theory of Probability, with especial 
reference to its application to Moral and Social Science. By John 
Venn, M.A., Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. 
Fcap. 8vo. "js. 6d. 

This Essay is in no sense mathematical. Probability, the author 
thinks, may be considered to be a portion of the province of Logic 
regarded from the material point of view. The principal objects of 
t/iis Essay are to ascertain how great a portion it comprises, where 
we are to draw the boundary between it and the contiguous branches 
of the general science of evidence, what are the Ultimate foundations 
upon which its rules rest, what the nature of the evidence they are 
capable of affording, and to what class of subjects they may most 
fitly be applied. The general design of the Essay, as a. special 
treatise on Probability, is quite original, the author believing that 
erroneous notions as to the real nature of the subject are disastrously 
prevalent. "Exceedingly well thought and well written," says the 
Westminster Review. The Nonconformist calls it a "masterly 



LONDON : K. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS, BREAD STREET HILL. 



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